Nara

by M. L. Buchman

  She headed the list. Ri Jeffers, Officer of the Watch, her first solo aboard the Stellar One, the first colony ship to the stars. The whole ship, hers to command. Her responsibility.

  Her cadre, Tancho Cadre were gone.

  She managed a calming breath.

  Only five teams were active aboard ship. Twenty-one of the twelve thousand-strong construction team were awake. How much trouble could she get in with only twenty-one people to watch over?

  Another calming breath brought her closer to her peaceful center.

  Thirty seconds later she was pacing yet another lap of the unoccupied command consoles. The watchful eye of the blue-and-white planet studied her from the main screen.

  Navigation console: they were circling in low-Earth orbit, no news there. Engine control: like the engines, not installed yet. Next month or maybe the one following. They were four months from departure for this expedition to the stars. And thirty-seven years in transit to cover the ten-and-a-half light years to Epsilon Eridani. In Nara, Japan sixteen had been an elder, twenty-five an unknown limit of the greatest wisewoman. Here, she could easily live to see a new planet four decades in the future.

  Again she thrust aside the thought. The thought that any new planet had to be better than the old one.

  Biome systems: all seven ecologic preserves showed green lights. The other command stations either reported nothing of interest or nothing at all, waiting for some crucial part to arrive from Earth on the latest shuttle. Past the Captain’s station and once more back to her security console.

  Two hours. She’d been fidgeting for two hours. It was nerves. She’d never let them control her in the past and she wouldn’t now. Placing her feet firmly, she sat in the security console chair, and for the first time on the watch, at 2 a.m. Space Time, she slid the chair forward until it locked into the work position. All green. Everything was green. She could work with that.

  Seven seconds later every buzzer, warning light, and screen lit up, beeped, blatted, and otherwise did its best to piss her off.

  “Damn you, Olias!” The thought might be sub-verbal, but the sentiment was heartfelt. “My first watch, you didn’t need to overdose me.” Even as she cursed, she slapped at the silencers and opened the readouts. The sub-commander’s endless drills had clearly served their purpose as her hands performed tasks by rote and left her mind free to interpret events.

  A blast of high-energy gamma particles had swept across Stellar One like a tsunami wave. The only indicators at danger level, now that their mind-numbing sirens were silenced, lay on the sunside of the ship’s outer hull. All of the internal readings revealed standard radiation levels. The construction workers aboard could continue their slumber undisturbed by the emergency exercise.

  Sub-Commander Olias Sunra entered from the main portal.

  “Report!”

  Some angry part of her wanted to reply that he should already know as he’d programmed the simulation. Instead, she reported per standard protocol.

  “High-energy radiation particles striking all sunward facing sensors. Hull secure. Reading levels of two-hundred plus kilorads.” A reading appropriate if someone had set off a nucleonic bomb close aboard. A stupid scenario for a drill.

  Rather than nodding or telling her the steps she’d missed, his leathery, scared face paled.

  “How much?” He levered his massive frame into the chair beside hers and pulled himself into his own console. It always amazed her that a man of such brute strength could move his hands so rapidly over the contact points.

  “Did you notify the Captain?”

  In answer, Captain Conrad’s private lift whisked open. Some instinctual part of Ri’s brain must have assessed the alarms as significant enough to send the wake-up call. Though it was 2 a.m. the Captain was impeccably dressed. Her space-black jumpsuit and short, silvered hair both perfectly in place.

  “Captain has command,” Devra Conrad stated in the quiet voice that brooked no argument even if there were any.

  Ri tapped up the simulation program to disengage it. She could have peeked here at the start of her shift and saved herself the heart-stopping shock of the radiation alarms. Except it wasn’t running. She scanned the open processes list once again. No training program was listed.

  “I was going to let you stew until your third shift.” Olias’ grimace might have passed for a smile.

  This radiation blast wasn’t one of his games. This was real. The jumpy nerves that had haunted her since midnight were gone. Now her body shifted into the clean adrenal-rush of her youth. Her mind expanded into the ice-cold set of survival.

  The blast had registered on Earth as well. The mid-Atlantic was taking the brunt of it. But the European Combine and the United Eastern Seaboard from New York dome down to the deserts of Brazil were going to need some serious medcorps attention.

  “Officer of the Watch, look to your ship.” The Captain’s voice, rough with tension, snapped Ri’s attention back to more local concerns.

  She searched for any other problems on the ship’s readouts that she might have missed in the initial shock as Captain Conrad hailed Mission Control.

  “Hanoi Launch, this is Stellar One.”

  “Davidson here. Knew you’d be calling. Don’t know much yet. Check the feed from the Icarus observatories. They have a good track on it.”

  Ri searched for their broadcasts. The Icarus crafts were launched four months ago to stations inside Mercury orbit. Two teams of scientists sent out to observe what a three hundred kilometer-wide asteroid would do when it impacted the Sun.

  “The Wanderer” asteroid had drifted into the solar system at a leisurely pace of a-million-and-a-half miles a day. It had soared quietly through the Earth’s orbit, missing Earth by less than a day and bulls-eyed the Sun’s equator a mere twenty-seven hours before. With little result. The observatories had recorded the splashdown, but other than a ring of fifty kilometer-high ripples across the plasma of the corona, there was nothing to report.

  Until now.

  Icarus Two’s frequency was silent.

  Icarus One was broadcasting a three-dimensional radar image showing a tongue of flame reaching out of the Sun for millions of miles.

  She had the computer interpolate the flare from a viewpoint above the Sun’s north pole. Simulated planetary orbits refined the perspective.

  The tongue of flame directly overlaid the silent Icarus Two, which might never respond again if the flare reading were correct. It was already passing Mercury’s orbit. Solar flares didn’t move that fast. This was… A few quick keystrokes to animate the image, moving at a third of the speed of light.

  And it was headed right for Earth.

  Without waiting for the Captain’s order, Ri smashed her fist down on the collision alarm.

  # # #

  The horn blasted into Bryce’s ears, he jerked awake, bashing his head against the plas frame of the bunk. Hard. And in a matter of two seconds he went from blissfully out of it to an engine-failure alarm-sized hangover. He grabbed the bunk with both hands while the room swirled and bobbed about him in an exceptionally cruel fashion.

  When the swaying dropped below reentry-buffet levels, he risked opening one eye, but didn’t dare raise his head. The light was low, other than the throbbing red one above the hatch. Closing his eyes for a long moment did nothing to alleviate the steady pulsing light. Perhaps the alarm wasn’t just some figment of his pickled neurons.

  One eye. The other eye. Yup. Definitely an alarm. That’s what it was.

  He let his head roll to the left. A long row of three-tier bunks, all empty. Transient quarters. They looked the same on every single ship in orbit. Though not usually this big.

  Stellar One. That was it.

  If he was on the colony ship, where was his shuttle?

  He flopped his head to the right and something sharp poked his cheek.
Releasing one hand from his death grip on the mattress but clamping harder with the other to remain anchored against the turmoil inside his skull, he inspected the new affront to his aching head.

  A jotter.

  He dragged it in front of his face. One eye wasn’t focusing too well yet so he closed it. The screen blurred even worse. He closed the other one. No better. By squinting, he could just make out Cappy’s scrawl.

  E-run. Melissa jumped at a chance to do her first solo as engineer. Didn’t complain about getting your pay scale. She’s way cuter than you are, too.

  Hell, Melissa was cuter than all of them put together. Flaunted it too, not that she shared with any of the male crew. Cappy had signed the message with his usual yellow smiley-face. The man was so retrograde. He even wore shit-kicker boots and a cowboy hat whether flying or fishing. If he wore them to bed, none of his lady conquests, and he kept up a steady stream of them, were talking. But rumors said yes.

  Let Melissa have the money, he’d just dump the creds in some bar anyway. Though an emergency run paid double, which would have been nice. Of course, almost everything lately had been tagged as an e-run. Someone was in a damn big hurry to get this ship built and out of orbit.

  Bryce tapped for an update. The Lazy Jane was grounded an extra eight hours for a tank imbalance. Cappy’s signature wasn’t so smiley this time. He must be some kind of pissed at his assistant engineer about paying the pump-out fee. He’d warned Cappy that Melissa wasn’t ready yet. Technically she was fine. But he hadn’t taught her any of the quasi-legal tricks, like tank-purge during the reentry burn, never mind the really elegant sleights of hand.

  Revised lift time, twenty minutes. Another hour to orbit and dock. Time enough for him to shower, grab some breakfast, and be lounging in the Lady J’s arrival airlock with a trashy novel just to rub it in. Perfect.

  He cleared and slotted the jotter. Swung up in bed, remembering too late to duck. He clipped the top of his head on the next bunk up. Head between knees. Deep breaths. He rode the edge of nausea like a skysurfer riding the edge of atmosphere skip. He managed to keep last night’s cheap party food down. He’d landed a shuttle in worse shape than this. Hadn’t enjoyed it, but could do it. Getting out of the transient quarters might kill him though.

  Once on his feet, the room thought it would be fun to flip him into a wall. And another. Fighting against the vagaries of his inner ear’s attempts to sabotage him, he staggered toward the hatch.

  Red light. Blinking. The damned alarm. He’d forgotten about that. Probably just another stupid drill. New ship Captains were always drill-happy.

  The hatch irised out of the way. The central lounge was a vicious assault on his aching optic nerves. Bright light. White walls. Way too many people. Bright blue technician shipsuits. Iridescent orange of the space workers, vacuum welders, fitters, jet operators, and the like. And in their midst, the bright, command-red of Johnson Merkar, the new fabrication foreman.

  Right, some stray neuron that had survived last night’s debacle reminded him, last night’s party had welcomed Merkar aboard.

  Every person turned to inspect Bryce at his entrance. No reaction. Not one smile from anyone, not even from the two brunettes he’d been chatting up last night. Three heartbeats and then they all turned their attention back to the vidwall. Abandoned books and jotters were scattered on tables and chair arms. A card game was at a dead stop, half the hands showing on the table, cards dribbling one by one out of a player’s hand and floating to the floor. Just when a guy needed a bit of sympathy, nothing.

  Who cared about a drill simulation anyway? Just a bunch of orbital data.

  Screw ‘em.

  He barely had an hour before he had to be in position to harass Cappy. How should he treat Melissa? A sad shake of the head. A curt bark of a laugh. Or perhaps a bit of sympathy. Nah! She was a good kid, just green, but he had a professional image of reticent surliness to uphold.

  He was most of the way to the bathroom before the images on the vid sank through the mush inside his skull. Something wasn’t right. He looked back at the wall and walked square into the partition between the bathroom and the exit hatch.

  The lower part of the vid showed Earth orbit. Nearly a hundred tracks circled the planet. The high L5 colonies at the LaGrange points, the corporate factories, solar relays, even some of the low-orbit comm and tourist stuff. Stellar One was picked out with a bright blue circle.

  An orbital diagram of the Sun and the first three planets dominated the upper portion of the wall. A swath of solar flare washed from the Sun out past the orbit of Mercury. Damn big flare. Some of the older satellites were not going to do well. Ground communications would be screwy for days.

  He glanced at the flare velocity and mass numbers down the side and turned for the bathroom. Despite the abuse he’d heaped on it last night, his brain managed to arrange the numbers into a meaningful array and he stopped as a shiver rooted him to the spot. They were like nothing he’d ever even heard about, not even in Cappy’s tall tales.

  Blinking a couple times did nothing to fix the problem. Flares took two, even three days to get from the Sun to Earth. At the rate this one was moving… He managed to do a bit of math in his head without a total cerebral meltdown. Total time in transit, twenty-four minutes.

  Nothing moved that fast, especially not large chunks of the solar corona. The rest of the data he needed wasn’t on-screen. Maybe they didn’t have it yet. If there was a flare that big coming, they needed to get out of the way befo—

  “Launch Control. Stellar One here. Can you confirm our arrival in Earthshadow prior to flare arrival?”

  Someone in command was thinking. But her voice! Calm and cool as could be. The numbers were scaring the shit out of him, yet there wasn’t the slightest quaver in the officer’s speech. Might be asking if Launch wanted a glass of ice tea while he was considering his answer.

  “Launch Control here. Jeffers? Thought Olias or Conrad would have taken over.”

  “They’re both present, but they, uh, feel that the Officer of the Watch should ride it out even if it’s her first watch.” Her voice was touched with chagrin. So, she had emotions, how did that get through her command training? Those who wore space black were near automatons in their dedication to duty. Cappy was the only exception he’d ever met, but then again, he’d dropped out of the WEC and hocked his life to buy an aging cargo shuttle.

  Launch laughed. Sounded like Davidson. Good man. Head of Hanoi Launch. Also, his mother’s present beau. High mark in his favor. She always chose the very best.

  “Tell sub-Commander Sunra that he is a pompous jerk and remind him that he owes me a fifth of scotch before you leave orbit. And it had better be a good bottle, twenty-year at least. Of course, he’s also right. You’ll do fine, Jeffers, or he wouldn’t have given you a watch at all. Let’s see. Um, yes. Can confirm your arrival in Earthshadow three-point-six minutes ahead of flare. But it’s a big one, you may meet it coming out the far side.”

  “Appreciate the confirmation. I now show flare arrival in twelve minutes…mark.”

  “Confirm your mark.”

  “Is this due to the Wanderer?” A faint voice sounded from the background of one of the links.

  Ouch. Dumb question. Someone just lost a lot of points.

  “No kidding. How often do three hundred kilometer-wide asteroids plunge into the Sun? What is most irksome is that no one predicted this. It splashed in twenty-seven hours ago. We thought we were done with it.”

  “There was Bronson and Hendron.”

  Officer Jeffers had done her reading. Bryce had perused that article himself. “Perused.” Pretty good job, brain. That was at least a three-cred word. Definitely on the mend. Perused it, he now recalled, and been scared enough at the math to dump it and he hadn’t used that jotter pad again in case it brought bad luck. Apparently he should have tried harder.

 
Davidson, hemmed and hawed a bit, probably accessing his console. “Christ! Every reviewer thought they were nuts, but there it is. Lana!” His shout into the microphone blasted out so loud that everyone in the transient quarters flinched, including Bryce.

  “Get these guys for me. Damn! Look at these numbers. Get them fast. I don’t care if they’re in their wives’ beds or each others’, I want them online in thirty seconds.”

  In the lower left corner of the vid wall, not far from the taller brunette’s hips, was a data feed Bryce hadn’t noticed. It was odd. Providing information that was already outdated even as it changed. He shifted to peek between her and the shorter one’s elbow to locate the source.

  It was from Icarus One. From inside Mercury’s orbit, their data had taken six minutes to arrive at the speed of light, by which time the flare was thirty million kilometers closer. Their data was two minutes out of date by the time it arrived and getting further behind every moment as receivers closer to the Earth and Stellar One picked up the trace.

  As if on cue, another voice joined the conversation. It was broken, a weak signal with a lot of interference.

  “Icar… One. Lost contac… Ic… Two.” A blinking red circle appeared in the wall projection. Exactly in the path of the flare. At the very best, their electronics were fried and they’d need a bit of rescuing. At the worst, Bryce looked away from the flashing circle. There were people out there. He was pretty sure that Jimmy Colson had shipped out as their engineer. Research missions, long, dull, but good pay. Best not to think about it too much. Welcome to space.

  “Estimate thirty… metric tons solar mass in flare. Repeat.…’rty times ten eighteenth… ‘ons.”

  This wasn’t some communications problems for a few days. That was a fireball with the mass of the Mediterranean Sea. That was a lot of plasma.