Aft of a big sphere covered with intricate coils was a thing that looked like a model of an old-timey sailing ship, with bands and sheets of clear stuff wrapped around its spars and masts in lieu of rigging. Some of the bands, I could see, were twisted like Mobius strips. Cables and bars led on aft, ending where the bulkhead sagged into a once-molten lump.
I looked around the inner hull, and realized there was no sign of the translucent blisters. Two fat cables, though, stuck to fat black plugs on opposite sides. Probably mapped to the right spots.
Ylva said, “If I had to guess, I'd say the coiled sphere is some kind of powerplant.”
There was a little access port that opened as easily as everything else. When I shined a light, the sphere was empty inside. Smooth metal-like surface with discolorations here and there. “So ... what? Fusion reactor?”
“No easy way to know.”
Jenny, still angry, said, “This isn't doing us any good.”
But she reached out, grabbed one of the cables where it plugged into the sphere, and gave it a tug. It came out easily, revealing a socket with holes and a connector with many black pins.
“Huh. These people weren't much ahead of us.”
Ylva said, “No. Maybe it doesn't take much.”
When I was a kid, eighty, ninety years ago, no one could have built a spaceship like Anabasis, or even had a theory about how. Z-pinch fusion? What's that? But if one had turned up in low-earth orbit, some smart guys riding up to rendezvous in a Gemini capsule would've seen what it was, maybe even understood what it did.
Jenny said, “All right. What do you want to do? Other than call HQ and tell them what's up.”
Ylva said, “The machine parts of me claim we could feed power to this thing from Anabasis.”
Jenny grated out, “Are you crazy?”
Crazy? It's just a computer, ain't it?
I said, “That sounds like a pretty good way to commit suicide.”
Ylva said, “And your point would be?”
Jenny: “Oh, Christ. You're not seriously thinking of going along with this, are you?”
If I hadn't been in a spacesuit, I would've rubbed my scaly chin and wished for day-old whiskers. “The worst that can happen is, it blows up. So long as we stand clear...”
“Zed, if it blows up, it's lost! Think about...”
I said, “You want Standard ARM to have it? The government? Worse still, the UN?”
“No,” said Ylva's low, sullen whisper. “We do not want that.”
I could see despair in Jenny's cameo. But she didn't say anything else.
* * * *
By retracting three of the eight radiator vanes, we managed to get Anabasis belly-landed on Hector a couple of hundred meters from the alien ship, coming down ever so gingerly on OAMS thrusters, wasting more kerolox than we had to spare, Z-pinch reactor ticking away at powerhead-idle.
If Hector had been much bigger, it probably would've been impossible to land, given these things are space-only, not intended to set down on anything much larger than Phobos. They're sturdy enough, I suppose. AndrewsSpace still builds them in Nevada, handles them with strongback cranes, ships them to Florida and flings them toward orbit on decades old Jupiter 130 boosters, but that's the last time they ever see a planet or an atmosphere.
We ran power cables to the lander, then on to the alien ship, photographing everything as we took it apart, making sure we could get it back together, fumble-fingered in our spacesuits, tireder than we really should have allowed.
Somehow, though...
Yeah. Excitement building, however insane this really was.
For Christ's sake.
We found an alien spaceship!
How cool is that?
Took us the longest to fabricate compatible connectors by hand from the spare parts bin, following directions generated by some rule sieve inside Ylva. Midway through that process, she said, “Guys, we're being illuminated by laser from Callisto. My guess is someone noticed the radar pulses after all, and wants to know what's up.”
Long pause, then Jenny said, “What're they saying?”
“If she reads it, the beam feedback will let them know. Right now, it's just shining on us.”
“Correct. If we don't answer, they may think we crashed.”
You could see Jenny was puzzled. “Isn't there an automatic response mech ... oh.” Automatic. That would be Ylva. “Then what lie...”
“We need to decide what to do,” I said. “Pretty much right now.”
And what? Turn it in and give Standard ARM a starship? The phrase “over my dead body” came to mind. That would be the most likely result anyway.
Jenny's inner tension was visible in the scaly skin around her eyes. “Or what? Steal it? And then what? Where the hell would we go? This isn't some damn movie!”
Ylva said, “Maybe we need to find out if it is stealable, first.”
I stood looking down at the damned thing, at the gaping hatch on the side of its service module, our shiny black cables trailing over the dirt and disappearing into the darkness within, then said, “In for a penny, I guess...”
I wonder what they'll do to me? Back to prison? Take away the drugs and let me die? Or just kill my sorry old Sleestak ass right away?
Jenny sighed, cameo eyes far, far away. “Right. I mean, what's the worst can happen?” Maybe she was thinking long term? If she didn't catch much of the blame, Standard would fire her, take her off the drugs, send her home and ... children, grandchildren, life as we once knew it.
Ylva's cameo, my sultry Ylva, threw back her head and laughed, eyes so very bright. “The damned thing explodes, and I get to go where the goblins go, after all.”
* * * *
Not much more and we were ready to roll, Ylva running the automatics, Jenny sitting at my control station in Anabasis, ready to take over, if there was a need, as well as time. Fat chance. They had the reactor running as fast as it could with only five radiator vanes deployed, nuclear drive primed and ready to throttle up, detcord wrapped around the cables, “just in case.”
Me? I sat in the lander, manning a portable freeze frame we'd set up as an operational board. Oh sure, I had the thrusters configured for a quick getaway, but ... whatever melted the back of that starship would sure as hell melt me. Small loss, I suppose.
If we live, then we can think of what to do next.
Ylva said, “Jenny?”
“Anabasis control, aye.”
“Mr. Zed?”
“Go with throttle-up.”
“Silly.” A pause, then I saw the 3D histograms in my freeze frame start to climb.
There was just a moment for me to think, Well, you know, boy-o, this is just about the damned stupidest thing I can possibly imagine myself ... then I said, “Lookit that! The accelerometers we stuck on the hull are showing positive thrust. Not much, but...”
Ylva said, “I'll start the power feed run-up.”
I craned my neck. “Uh. Blue light?”
“Look at your board.”
“Wow! Thrust's building up, uh...”
Something prickled on my cheek, like sunshine coming through my spacesuit visor. Except ... right. No visor, it's just a ... “Oh, hell...” When I looked again, the alien starship was lifting slowly over the rim of the hole we'd dug, blinding blue-violet light glaring out of those translucent blisters on the hull. My suit optics were putting amoebic black cores over the middle of the things, protecting my real-world eyesight and...
Stupid, all right. Stupid, stupid ... but all I said was, “Jeez, look how melty the damned thing's getting, I...”
Ylva snapped, “Shutdown!”
The blue-violet light went out and the thing was drifting, drifting back down to the surface of Hector.
I said, “Why...”
She said, “It started putting out a hard gamma pulse.”
“How, ah...”
“Really hard. If it weren't for the drug regimen, you'd be feeling pretty sick right now. We'll
need to get you back aboard for emergency medical treatment. Spike those drugs up as far as you can tolerate, at least.”
Jenny whispered, “Lethal?”
Oh, nice thought!
Ylva said, “For an unmod human, yes. As it is, I've got a few other problems I need to deal with. Some of my commercial electronics turn out to be insufficiently radiation hardened. Cheap bastards.”
I thought about the dead alien pilot. I'm sure he'd know how she felt.
Jenny said, “I guess Callisto will probably notice this.”
Ylva laughed, and so did I, noticing I was indeed a wee bit queasy. “We'll need to move out of here pretty quick.”
Ylva said, “Oh, there's no more hurry than there ever was. There's nothing they can do to get here any quicker. Orbital mechanics and available propulsion haven't changed.”
Looking at the alien ship settled aslant on the rim of the hole, I said, “Well. Not yet.”
And Jenny said, “Move. Um. Where did you have in mind?”
“Well, that depends, doesn't it?” I said. “Ylva, I'm just going to walk over, if you don't mind. We can leave everything hooked up.”
She said, “Hurry.”
Somewhere deep inside, an old, old part of me whispered, Well, well, well ... and started to grin.
* * * *
When I was about twenty, bored with the lecture in some damned class I was taking at Northern Virginia Community College, I doodled in my notebook, and wrote a poem I called “The Neutron Bomb.” It wasn't much of a poem, but it had one line I always remembered: “I lay for a week in shivering heat, and dreamed of my boyhood rooms...”
Now, shivering in a haze of fever dreams, I remembered the line, and the dying man in the poem, who said, “Then I saw soldiers come up my street, and they were armed with shovels and brooms.”
Sometimes, I could see the pressure-fed IV in my arm, see three little plastic baggies floating around, tethered to the wall by velcro, see the metal gang valve, the loopy plastic tubing, the needle taped to the inside of my elbow. Sometimes, I saw somebody change it, touch my sweaty brow, look worried. Ylva? Of course not, silly. She's dee-ee-ay-dee dead. “Jenny?”
“Shh. Last batch.”
Suddenly alone in the room.
She'd blinked out like a light.
More likely the massive drug onslaught fucking with my cellular machinery than any side effect of the gamma pulse, but ... I suddenly felt cold, suddenly burst into a hot sweat, suddenly felt my bowels cramp. Slid away like a freeze frame ghost.
I was lying on the floor, not far from a red-brick fireplace, watching a black and white TV in a purplish-red metal cabinet. Magnavox. What does that mean? Loud voice.
Spaceship on the TV, an improbable cartoon spaceship, like a dirigible with fire coming out the tail, voiceover saying something about 1959, then something else about the far off world of 1970. Spaceship on its way to Mars.
Sudden, hard pulse in my chest. Rising excitement. 1970? That's no more than ten years away! Will they really get to Mars by then? Oh, sure, there've been satellites for a couple of years, and the Russians even shot a camera round the backside of the Moon, but Mars? No one's even been in orbit...
The cartoon, it seemed, was called “The Space Explorers.”
And in 1970, I would be twenty years old. Still in school. Oh, sure, college, kind of grown up, but still ... In 1970, I'd be too young to go on the first spaceship to Mars. I'd been counting on it taking a bit longer, a Willy Ley book I'd read claimed it would take twenty-five years to get to the Moon. Much better. I'd be thirty-five, the perfect age to be the First Man on the Moon, you see...
Felt my breath blow out hot as hell itself, cold sweat gathering on my cheeks, no gravity to make it run...
Brief vision of me and some fat friend, standing by the Canaveral countdown sign, watching the first launch of the Space Shuttle thanks to the press passes we'd finagled. I was thirty-one by then, and knew I wouldn't be going anywhere, not just anytime soon, but ever.
Jenny's voice, “That's it. Hope that didn't hurt.” Well, it did, but who cares. “I'm going to take your catheter out now, okay?”
Sandpapery fingers on my empty crotch ... ow! Wait, that does hurt...
Me and Sarah standing on the Moon, looking up at Earth, standing just outside the airlock of the lander Standard ARM bought from tSpace, looking up at beautiful blue-white Earth in a dead black sky, talking about whether or not it would be worth our while to make a flight to Mars as part of drumming up investment, before pressing on to the oilfields of Jupiter's Trojan Asteroids...
What was it, maybe another three months before the FBI busted into our corporate headquarters in Denver? Poor Willie. Sarah. I miss the hell out of you both...
Fell asleep suddenly, and slept without dreams.
* * * *
Ylva's cameo floated over me, well, beside me anyway, floated outside my sleeping cocoon, and I could see Jenny, live and scaly gray-green, floating in the open hatch beyond. Ylva said, “Good. You're awake.”
“Christ. How long?”
Jenny said, “Six days.”
“Wow.”
I thought about asking how I was doing, but ... I guess if I was a goner, I'd already be gone. “Situation?”
Ylva said, “Callisto sent a ship. There was a radio broadcast from HQ we could tap. They think the gamma burst was our reactor blowing up.”
“They can't really blow up.”
She grinned, sexy and conspiratorial. “That's what AndrewsSpace says, too. They're mad as hell about the broadcast.”
“So, what? About three weeks?”
“Yep.”
From the doorway, Jenny said, “We've been busy while you were out. Figured out we could attach the derelict to the lander, use its motors to lift off Hector.”
I got a chill, heard my teeth start to chatter.
“We can dock the lander to Anabasis as soon as it's clear of the asteroid, and use the main engine to pull away to a safe distance.”
“Safe from what?”
Ylva said, “Safe from running into Hector after we start the alien space drive.”
Cold sweat. “Last I remember, we decided we were crazy if we did that.”
Jenny laughed, which surprised me, and Ylva said, “I'd say I'm game, but I'm dead. What the hell do I know?”
* * * *
They'd been busy little beavers while I was away on fever sabbatical, having used the lander's machinery to pull the alien spaceship the rest of the way onto the surface, then walked the lander over and secured it to the thing's nose. Not really possible to weld it, as such, because the lander was carbon fiber with titanium hardpoints, while the alien's hull was some weird beryllium alloy, but they'd managed a few explosive welds with mining caps here and there, then secured the rest with a couple of spools of composite cable.
I watched them lift Anabasis off the surface with the OAMS thrusters, then gotten inside so they could burp the main engine without roasting me again. Time to fly? That little tingly thrill in my fingertips, as always.
Somewhere inside me, the little boy who wanted to be a Space Explorer had waited patiently in some dark corner of my soul, while the man who was afraid of roller coasters and Ferris wheels, afraid to ride glass elevators up the outsides of tall buildings, afraid to drive his car over the Brooklyn Bridge, afraid, on some bad days, to climb a stepladder, lived out a half century in vain.
I remember the scared man was still alive the day the little boy made him get inside a SpaceX Dragon and wait for the countdown to finish. He was still alive for just a second as the rocket engines lit and that big Falcon 9 swayed, launch escape system tower tracing out a terrifying circle against the clouds.
Then he was no more.
I remember the look in Sarah's eyes when the ride was over and we were flying high above the Atlantic, high in Earth orbit. I remember how I felt when she whispered, “I knew you could do it.”
I hadn't. Not until the moment when it turn
ed out I could.
I made rendezvous with Anabasis a few kilometers up, Hector still a world-like wall outside, completed hard dock, powered down the lander, and pulled the hatch shut behind me, joining Jenny in the command module.
Ylva's cameo, more or less doll-like, but shifting a bit, back and forth between my sexpot and Jenny's giggly girlfriend, floated above the real world frame, through which we could see the lander's RMS arms moving, picking up cables and connectors, plugging Anabasis into the alien ship.
She said, “I'm going to pull back about a dozen kilometers or so. Give us a little fallback space.”
“Is that far enough? What if...”
I said, “It might not be a bad idea if we're close enough that we fall back to Hector, should there happen to be trouble that doesn't kill us.”
Ylva, looking amused. “Yeah. That way the Standard crew can find what's left.”
In a bit, Hector was smaller in the freeze frames, though still a substantial, lopsided world blotting out a big patch of sky, like Earth seen from a couple of thousand kilometers up, making me remember those first stunning views from the later Gemini flights, the first ones to go above minimal low Earth orbit.
Long silence.
Nothing to say, except, “Y'all ready?”
Ylva laughed, “Your fake Southron accent is piss-poor, Zed!”
“Hey, I lived in North Carolina for forty years!”
Jenny murmured, “When? Fifty years ago? I still hear Boston.”
Dawdling. Delaying tactics. Because we're both afraid? All afraid? Even Ylva? Are the dead afraid to die?
So I whispered, “No time like the present.”
Ylva said, “Go with throttle-up. It really was funny, Mr. Zed.”
Gallows humor.
Through the live-action frame, I could see blue-violet light start to shine around the lander's hull. I took a quick look at freeze frames full of data. Enough rems out there to kill an unprotected man in just a few minutes. Slight rise in here. Okay. Sitting here in the apex of Anabasis's CM, we were in the umbra of the shielding mass's shadow, both the lander and the alien, who probably needed pretty good shielding himself if he was going to ride that thing. That plus the hydrogen-rich polyethylene lining of the CM...
Asimov's SF, September 2008 Page 5
