He started to protest, but she looked at him and he demurred.
The satellite was a disturbance at twilight, a shifting of light tones not quite seen. But it was impossible not to know something was there.
She put on a go-pack and stepped into the airlock. “Tell me what to do,” he said.
“Just stay put. If something happens, you’re the backup. Rescue me. If you can’t, clear out. Tell Bill to take you back to the ship. Under no circumstances monkey with the satellite.”
SHE USED THE go-pack to circle the object. Even from a few meters, the thing had no definition, but was rather a swirl of darkness and mirror images. She didn’t touch it until she’d finished a complete scan. The AI detected the field device which coordinated the unit’s stealth capabilities.
“If I shut it off,” she told Tor, “we’ll be able to see what we’re working with.”
“If you shut it off,” said Tor, “it might explode.”
“No. Can’t be.” The satellite that Preach had shown her had been shut down. And it hadn’t blown up.
“But maybe it starts a timer.”
He had a point. Well, she would find out. She maneuvered in close, found the switch, hesitated for the briefest moment, and moved it to its opposite setting. Off.
Nothing happened.
She retreated to the lander, climbed inside, and they withdrew to a thousand meters. And waited.
Still nothing.
They gave it two hours. When the time expired, and the satellite remained quietly whole, she returned to it.
She went over it with a scanner, assembled a complete schematic, collected more scrapings, and waved to Tor, who was watching anxiously from the pilot’s seat. She was getting advice from everybody by then. Especially from Tor. Mostly it consisted of Don’t touch anything and Look out now.
When she was finished she went back to the lander. They rendezvoused with the Memphis and she forwarded the results to Outpost.
THE SETUP WAS the same as at 1107. Hutch used the position of the stealth to calculate the locations of the other two satellites. They found one of them. The missing one, of course, would be the satellite that the Condor had located.
They were congratulating themselves on their success when the results came in from the Brandeis transmission.
It contained a surprise. The stealth that the Condor had been examining at the time of the incident was less than a century old. Closer, the experts thought, to eighty years.
It was brand-new.
LATE THAT EVENING, the Brandeis found sections of the engine room. By morning, Park had concluded that the fusion engines had exploded. “We don’t know why,” he told Hutch, “but at least we can dismiss the idea there’s something spooky running around out here.”
“I guess I’m glad to hear it,” she said.
“Something else: The stealth you looked at.”
“What about it?”
“It’s active. The imagers react to light. Change their focus. Look at sunrises, sunsets. They even took a look at us.”
“They watched you?”
“Yes.”
This kept getting stranger. “Is it still watching you?”
“No. We moved off behind it. I don’t think it can see us anymore.”
PARK’S PEOPLE SPENT two days climbing around on the stealth. The unit was a sophisticated package of sensors, telescopes, and antennas. It had computers and navigation equipment and thrusters, to allow it to adjust position. It had radio transmitters and receivers. And early analysis indicated it used vacuum energy as its power source. But it had no explosive device.
“Not bad,” said one of the technicians. “I’m not sure we could have designed something like this.”
“The pieces don’t fit,” George said that night. “They’re capable of going out to 1107, but they don’t have lightbender technology. And the bus at their moonbase looked pretty primitive.”
“We have different levels of technology on display, too,” said Tor. “There are still satellites in orbit that were put up by the Soviets.”
“What I’d like to know,” said Pete, “is whether this is the same kind of device that’s orbiting 1107.”
They were treating themselves to pastries, wine, and cheese. The gloom of the first days following the loss of the Condor had been partially dissipated by the successful (that is, uneventful) exploration of the moonbase. They had a major find. There were a few questions to be answered, but they were feeling pretty good. A survey mission was being assembled and would be there in a few months. Park and some of his people joined them, congratulated them, and he announced he’d finished everything he could do and was returning to Outpost in the morning.
Pete had been quiet most of the evening. He was sitting, enjoying a jelly donut. He’d gotten some of the powdered sugar on his nose but hadn’t seemed to notice. “I just don’t believe it,” he said abruptly. His eyes found Hutch. “The notion that the engines happened to explode just as they were starting to look at the satellite isn’t credible.”
“What other explanation is there?” asked Nick, reasonably.
Nobody had an answer.
AFTER THE MEETING drifted to an uncertain close, and Park and his people had returned to the Brandeis, Hutch went back to the bridge.
One of the disadvantages of living for an extended time on any of the Academy’s superluminals was that there were no places that guaranteed isolation from the other passengers, save in a private compartment. There was no such thing as a remote restaurant or a rooftop or a park bench.
Hutch needed someone. Captains were expected to maintain the tradition of not mixing romance with their passengers. But she felt desolate. She’d have liked to spend an evening somewhere with Tor. Not that she expected that particular romance, long dead, to reignite. Or even that she would have wanted it to reignite. But increasingly, since Preach had gone down, she’d felt the need for an intimate evening with somebody. She needed somebody to talk with, someone to look at her with longing, someone with whom she could retreat into the distance and pretend the past week had not happened.
She’d been given only a few hours with Preacher Brawley, and yet his loss had hit her hard. She found herself thinking about him at odd moments, during conversations with Bill, during meetings like the one she’d just attended, during workouts in the gym. She remembered how he had looked on that one rainy night in Arlington.
Gregory MacAllister had written somewhere that life was a series of blown opportunities. She remembered the Overlook and Beth the Singer and the good night kiss and watching his taxi turn back in the direction from which they’d come.
To Beth?
She shook it off and was grateful to hear someone enter. She noticed the lights were dim and brought them up to normal. It was Nick.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Am I disturbing you?” He was carrying a flask and two glasses.
“No,” she said. “Come in.”
“I thought you could use a drink.”
She invited him to sit. “I think I already had too many.”
He filled the glasses with dark wine and held one out for her. She took it, smiled politely at it, and set it down on the console.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Sure. Why do you ask?”
“It’s quiet up here.” He sipped his drink. “The lights were down. I just thought you haven’t really been yourself lately. But I can understand it.”
“I’m fine,” she said.
He nodded. “Maybe it’s time to start home.”
“Is that the consensus?”
“We’ve been talking about it. George’ll stay out here forever if he can. He’s got some puzzles to play with. And he wants to go down to the ground.”
“He can’t do that.”
“I know that. So does he. It drives him crazy. He thinks the Academy mission’ll be here in a few months, and they’ll take Safe Harbor away from him. This whole thing will become somebody else’s game.”<
br />
The wine looked cool and inviting. “None of us really gets what we want,” she said. “He’s lucky. You all are. You came out here and struck a mother lode. A place where there was actually a civilization. Where there are ruins. This only happens every twenty years or so.” She lifted the glass and tasted the wine. It slid down her throat and warmed her. “No, nobody’ll take this away. The books will remember you and George and the Condor. The follow-up mission”—she shrugged—“they’ll come out and do their work, but this place will always belong to the Contact Society.”
He was quiet for a time. She liked Nick. He was one of those rare people whose presence made her feel warm and comfortable. “Tell me how a funeral director,” she said suddenly, “got interested in extraterrestrials.”
His expression changed, lightened. “Just like anybody else. When I was a boy, I had too much imagination. Something in the water, I guess.” He looked at the wine, tasted it, decided it was good. “I never really got away from it. But as I got older my perspective changed.”
“In what way?”
“I think much the way George does. There are some questions I’d like answered.”
“For example?”
“‘Is there a creator?’”
“You expect to find an answer out here?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
“‘Is there a purpose to being alive?’ ‘Is there a point to it all?’” His gray eyes found hers.
Bill’s lamp came on. He had something for her. Not an emergency, though, or he’d simply have broken in.
“My profession is peculiar. We render a service people can’t do without. But we’re never taken seriously, except by mourners. People think of us as caricatures. Figures of fun.”
Hutch recalled her own amusement when she’d first learned of Nick’s profession.
“That’s why I’m still fascinated by ETs.” He leaned forward, his voice suddenly intense. “I have a talent for talking with people in times of stress. Everybody in my business does. You don’t survive without it. Survivors have a hard time at the end. I’m good at helping. At being there when a widow or a parent really needs somebody.” His eyes softened. “I’d love to be able to tell people that it’s really okay. That there’s a caretaker.”
“They hear that anyway.”
“Not from me.” He finished the wine and put the cup down. “I’d like to think it’s true.”
She looked at him.
“You’re right. I won’t find the answer out here. But for whatever reason, the question seems more real. Life at home is superficial. Here, we’re down to basics. If there’s an Almighty, this is where He hangs out. I can almost feel His presence.”
“Good luck,” she said.
“I know. George thinks we might eventually find an elder race. Somebody we can put the question to. Somebody who’s figured it out.”
“They won’t know either.”
“Probably not,” he said. “But there’s a chance. And that chance is why we came.”
She reached over, touching his wrist with her fingertips. He smiled sadly.
They needed a distraction so she switched over to Bill. “Am I interrupting?”
“No, Bill.” She sighed. “What do you have?”
“Transmission from Outpost.”
“Let’s see it.”
It was Jerry Hooper again. “We’ve looked at all three stealths,” he said. “They’re identical units.” He looked puzzled. “The first one you found is a hundred years old. More or less.” His eyebrows went up and the tip of his tongue played at the corners of his lips. “The others, the third one and the one Preach took on board, they go back more than twenty centuries.”
“Before the war,” Nick said.
It was as if the warm place they’d created on the bridge had turned official again. They were over the night side, and Hutch could see nothing of the ground below save the glowing haze of atmosphere along the rim of the world.
“Is that possible?” he asked.
Chapter 12
So long as you believe in some truth you do not believe in yourself. You are a servant. A man of faith.
— MAX STINER, THE EGO AND HIS OWN, 1845
“HUTCH.”
She rolled over and looked at the clock. A quarter after three. “Captain Park is on the circuit. He says it’s important.”
“Put him on,” she said. Bill understood that it would be audio only out of her bedroom.
Park looked sheepish. “I hate to bother you at this hour. We’re getting ready to pull out.” She had known, and they’d already said their good-byes. “But something happened. I don’t know whether it means anything or not. But I thought you should know right away. Just in case.”
If he wasn’t sure that it was important, it wasn’t important. “What is it, Ed?” she asked, letting her tone signal her irritation.
“The stealth you looked at.”
“Yes? What about it? Is it keeping an eye on you again?”
“No. But it’s transmitting.”
“Transmitting?” There was something ineffably sad about that. After all these years, the thing was still functioning. Signal to nowhere. “Thanks, Ed.”
He was shaking his head. “I’ve fed everything we have to Bill. See you next time.”
She sank back into the pillow, briefly considered waking George, not because she thought there was any rational need to do so, but simply because someone had awakened her.
She posted a transcript of the conversation and left it for him to look at over his breakfast.
THEY WERE IN the middle of a heated conversation when she walked into the dining room. “That’s not it at all,” Pete was saying. “The signal’s not being sent to the ground.”
A smile spread beatifically across George’s features. “What’s the difference? They’re all dead, Peter.”
Pete touched a link, and Safe Harbor appeared. The orbit used by the stealths blinked on. Then a series of vectors reached out from the orbit, forming a second circle, which was almost circumpolar. “The signal’s being directed along this route. The receiver’s in orbit, too, along there somewhere, but we don’t know its altitude, so we can’t determine precisely where it is.”
Tor leaned over. “They’re talking about the incoming signal, Hutch. The one from 1107.”
Pete took a bite out of a piece of toast and glanced up at her. “I asked Bill to look for the receiver but he says he can’t see anything.”
“Another stealth?” suggested George.
Nick had finished a plate of bacon and eggs, and was sitting contentedly drinking coffee. “What it suggests to me,” he said, “is a relay.”
“Well, of course it’s a relay,” said Herman. “So why do we care?”
“We aren’t talking about a relay to a local receiver,” said George. “We’re talking about another set of stealths, which in turn are relaying the signal somewhere else.”
That caught Hutch’s attention.
Alyx was chewing on a croissant. She stopped and looked around at her colleagues. “So what we’re saying is the locals didn’t put them up, right? Somebody dropped them off and kept going?”
Hutch had suspected the dating results, putting the age of one unit at about a century, had simply been in error. Now she saw what should have been obvious. “Somebody had a front-row seat for the war,” she said.
THEY FOLLOWED THE transmission and, within an hour, had located a new stealth. At Hutch’s suggestion, they searched along its orbit and found two more, placed equidistantly. Another planet-sized dish antenna, just like the one at 1107.
And Bill reported almost immediately that it was transmitting. “Outbound,” he added.
“Bill, is the direction of the signal perpendicular to the plane of the orbit?”
“Yes.”
Alyx and Tor were with her on the bridge when that answer came back. Alyx made a fist and pumped it up and down. It was another interstellar t
ransmission.
Below, in mission control, they were congratulating one another. Again.
They had jumped to the wrong conclusion, assuming that the Climbers had initiated the stealths. Hutch sank back into her seat. Safe Harbor wasn’t the terminal for the data stream coming in from 1107. When the signal arrived here it was picked up by what amounted to a giant dish antenna. Then it was passed to another antenna for relay. That was the signal the Brandeis had picked up.
A virtual George blinked on. He was glowing. His fists were closed and he was literally trembling with joy. “Hutch,” he said, “you understand what this means? What we’ve tapped into?”
“I think you’ve hit the jackpot, George,” she said.
“Are we sure?” asked Alyx. “I mean, it’s not being sent to their moonbase, is it?”
George could scarcely contain himself. But the question induced a moment of doubt.
“No,” Hutch said. “It is most certainly not aimed at the moonbase.”
“Where, then?” asked George.
Bill’s image appeared, on cue, on her overhead screen. His white hair was combed back, and he was wearing a navy blue jacket with his initial, B, embroidered on the pocket. “Closest target,” he said, “along the transmission line appears to be a class-K star, catalog KM 449397. Range is forty-three light-years.”
“That’s pretty far out,” said George.
“So what we’re saying,” said Alyx, “is that whoever’s been planting all these satellites lives out at this class-K?”
Tor shook his head. “That sounds like the same assumption we made about Safe Harbor.”
Bill cleared his throat. He wasn’t finished.
“What else, Bill?” said Hutch.
“There’s a possibility the signal just goes through the 97 system. There’s another target directly beyond.”
George sighed. “Which is what?”
“The Maritime Cluster.”
“How far’s that?” asked Alyx.
“Twelve thousand light-years,” said Hutch. Bill’s eyebrows drew together, indicating that she was off by a thousand or two. But he said nothing.
Nick’s voice came over the commlink: “They have to be in the biozone, don’t they? Would this signal carry twelve thousand light-years?”
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