Second Star (Star Svensdotter #1)

by Dana Stabenow

  We all listened, and sure enough the tramp of booted feet shuffling down the corridor became louder. I stepped over to Lodge and ripped the tape from his mouth. “Call them off, Grays, or you’ll be the first to go.”

  Grayson Cabot Lodge the Fourth would never do anything so lowbred as to spit in someone’s face but I could tell he was tempted. Mastering temptation, he collected himself enough to say disdainfully, “Shoot and be damned to you, Star. You can only do it once.”

  I couldn’t help it, I had to laugh, and he flushed and looked at me with a murderous expression in his dark eyes. “Your Nathan Hale complex is showing,” I told him, and nodded to Caleb. We manhandled him and Emily over to the door and showed Lodge to his troops with Caleb’s scattergun pointed at his head. They backed off immediately, presumably to go to their Plan B. If so, they were ahead of us. “Simon, is Archy back on line?”

  “You bet I am, Star! Are you going to space the bastard who mind-blinded me?”

  I looked a question at Simon and he shook his head as if to say, Don’t ask. I said, “I’m thinking seriously about it, Archy. Are all your programs up and running?”

  “That’s a big ten-four, Star, and I’ll crack the lock for you when you’re ready.”

  I gave Simon another inquiring look and he gave me a nod of reassurance that seemed halfhearted at best. “Then call Jorge at Copernicus Base, please.”

  There was a brief pause, then, “Star! You made it! Gracias a Dios! I was certain that if the capsule didn’t kill you that that pendejo of a Patrol commodore would.”

  He added a few other uncomplimentary observations on Lodge’s parentage, and I had to interrupt him before he really got going. “Now, now, Jorge, watch your language, there is a gentleman present.”

  “Verdad? You’ve got Lodge?”

  “Really, Jorge, this lack of faith hurts my feelings. Of course I have Commodore Lodge, he’s here with me now. He’s having a little difficulty in seeing things our way. Would you please explain to him the ramifications of Plan A?”

  “Encantado,” Jorge said cheerfully. “Commodore Lodge, Plan A is a modest little welcoming party Star and I planned years ago, a few days after you moved in on LEO Base. It goes like this: Even as we speak, the mass launchers are being reprogrammed for a new trajectory. If you don’t order your forces off Ellfive in the next ten minutes, in fifteen I will begin launching a series of mass driver capsules loaded with lunar slag to impact on Ellfive’s surface at a set of preselected target locations.”

  The commodore snorted. “You don’t scare me, Velasquez. I know the figures as well as you. One panel breaks, it takes three years for the atmosphere to leak out. The Alliance is going to be up here with a force to protect their investment in three days.”

  Jorge’s accent thickened. “Seguramente, your figures are correct, Commodore, but we are more ambitious than that, Star and I. Using both drivers it should take about thirteen hours, más o menos, to knock out O’Neill Central. O’Neill Central, as you know, controls the entire habitat.” Jorge paused, and added helpfully, “Ah, sí, the Alliance. Well, do you know, señor, I wouldn’t place any dependence on their timely arrival if I were you. Once O’Neill Central goes, there isn’t anything to stop Ellfive from spiraling down and impacting on Terra. The habitat is too large to burn up completely on reentry. Terra will have its own problems. Chicken Little, compréndeme?”

  Lodge looked at me, the defiance fading from his dark eyes. I stared back solemnly, doing my best to appear confident and in command of the situation. Jorge was improving on the text. The truth was we didn’t know if Ellfive would spiral down to Terra, or not burn up on reentry, or even start to wobble for that matter, and where he had got that thirteen-hour figure was beyond me. But put together it all sounded scary enough.

  “And,” Jorge said, the pleasant smile fading from his face to leave it unaccustomedly stern, “there is not a lot Orientale or GEO Base or LEO Base can do to stop us, Commodore, since you took your entire fleet with you to Ellfive. I hear those Fiver estancieros are not quite the weakling pushovers you thought they would be. I would also like to remind you that I am not so idealistic as Star Svensdotter, that Copernicus Base has always been armed, and is de este momento secured against the Patrol.”

  I allowed that to sink in, watching Grays’s expression fade from impassivity to the first faint traces of fear. The fact was that for the first time in a long and illustrious career Grayson Cabot Lodge the Fourth had overreached himself, and I wanted him to be fully cognizant of the vulnerability of his position.

  “Star’s bluffing, Grays,” said Emily Holbrook Castellano, speaking for the first time from over Lodge’s shoulder. “She would as soon slaughter her own child as destroy this place.”

  “Why, Emily, I had quite forgotten you were there,” I said to her, furious that she might be able to sway Grays. “Not quite the headline you were expecting, is it? ‘Bloodless Coup Overthrows Ellfive Despot’? Keep your mouth shut or I’ll shut it for you, permanently.”

  “You can’t—”

  “I can’t what?” I said, starting to shake again. Caleb took my arm and I pulled away. “I can’t stuff out the nearest airlock the person who called the Space Patrol and pointed out the golden opportunity presented by Viskov’s and Bugolubovo’s arrival and my absence to invade Ellfive?”

  Simon gave Emily a considering look. “Well, well.”

  “It was a long flight,” I told him. “I didn’t have much to do except glide and think.” I looked back at Emily with hot eyes, remembering the scene in the corridor. “I should shoot you now, you little weasel.”

  “Star.”

  Charlie’s voice cut across my own. I turned to meet her level brown eyes. She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t have to.

  Roger did. He made a sound deep in his throat like I’d never heard him make before and went for Emily, his teeth bared and his hands extended in front of him like claws. They were almost around her throat before Caleb got to him. He lifted Roger easily and held him up off the floor. He kept holding him, murmuring soothingly into his ear until Roger stopped slavering to get at Emily and started to cool off.

  “You okay now, Roger?” Caleb said, patting him on the shoulder.

  “Yeah.” Roger gave a shaky sigh. “I’m all right now. I’m sorry, Star.” He looked at Emily. “If my new botanist has a scratch on her, you’re dead meat, bitch.”

  Caleb set Roger on his feet with a last reassuring pat. As an afterthought he moved Roger’s last javelin out of Roger’s reach.

  “Well, Grays?” I said. “Do we give Jorge the green light?”

  His voice was low, the Bostonian vowels not quite so broad or self-assured when he said, “You won’t do it. You wouldn’t kill me. Never me.”

  I felt Caleb stir behind me. “Try me,” I said softly. “Just try me, Grays.”

  His eyes shifted. “My men—”

  “There are five thousand Fivers, Grays. I’m not real concerned about a few hundred lousy Patrolmen, especially not after today.”

  He looked around the room. Charlie met his eyes indifferently, without relaxing her grip on the optics cannon. Elizabeth stood close by her side, gripping a fold of her mother’s blue jumpsuit. Caleb propped himself against one wall and whistled a soft tune as he reloaded the scattergun. Rex looked mean and suspicious. Paddy gave Lodge a sweet smile, the tiny butterfly tattoo on her cheek quivering. Simon was hunched over the viewscreen controls, and it was to him that Lodge spoke. “You’re second in command here, Turgenev. You can’t let her do this, destroy the habitat, kill thousands of people—”

  “Six minutes, Commodore,” Simon said in a bored voice without turning from the viewer.

  The commodore turned, as if compelled, to look back at me. “I mean what I say, Grays, and you of all people should know I don’t bluff and I won’t back down. The Space Patrol is not going to turn Ellfive into another military outpost, the way you did GEO and LEO and Orientale. I mean it, Grays. Even if I
have to destroy Ellfive to keep it from you.”

  He looked from me to the viewer, where Jorge stared out at us, his face impassive. The room was silent while we waited for his answer.

  — 8 —

  Thursday’s Child Has Far to Go

  It is not inconceivable that there is a kind of Galactic Survey, established by cooperating civilizations on many planets throughout the Milky Way Galaxy, which keeps an eye (or some equivalent organ) on emerging planets and seeks out undiscovered worlds.

  —Carl Sagan

  WITHOUT WARNING the viewscreen cut our link with Luna, interrupting the staring match between Commodore Lodge and myself. The flare alert was the only channel with the authority to override any other. “Petra?” I said. “Is that you?”

  Her face replaced Jorge’s on the viewer. She was uncharacteristically flustered. “Simon? Star? Are you there?” She gave her console a solid whack. “Damn this piece of electronic junk! Star?”

  “Petra,” I snapped, “we’re waiting for Armageddon here, do you mind?”

  “Never mind that now,” she said. Her eyes glittered and her voice was shrill with excitement.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said never mind that now! Remember the activity Hewie Seven picked up? What we thought was a flare? Well, it wasn’t.”

  I controlled my impatience. Calm, analytical Petra was not prone to hysteria. Or not in the normal course of events; I reminded myself that today could have given even the most stolid Fiver the screaming blue meanies. “I know that already, Petra, Paddy told me it was a false alarm. So what?” I felt the color drain from my face. “Oh, God, not another flare?”

  “Flare?” she said vaguely. “What flare? No, no, no, not that. At least I don’t think so. I can’t be certain but—”

  “What?”

  “This whole thing is so crazy—”

  “What is?”

  “You’re going to think I’m nuts, but I—I—”

  “What!”

  She laughed, a queer, wild little laugh. “You’re not going to believe it, you’ll never believe it, I don’t believe it myself.”

  “Petra!”

  She squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and said simply, “I think that what we thought was a flare is some kind of a—I think it’s a ship.”

  There must have been a glitch in transmission. “What did you say, Petra? It sounded like you said that flare was a ship?”

  “I said I think the flare is a ship. I’ve been trying to get through to you to tell you about it but something happened to Archy and then the whole system went kaboom.” I was silent and she demanded, “Did you hear what I said, Star? I think what we thought was a flare is a ship. A spaceship. Not one of ours,” she added unnecessarily.

  “Right,” I said. “We’ll talk about it later, Petra—”

  “See for yourself, dammit!” she said, and the viewer’s image shifted from her face to the Hewie Seven readout while her voice-over narration continued. “This is a playback of what began to happen on Sol less than two hours ago.” With a slight sense of shock I remembered that it was only two hours since I had been on Luna. I moved closer to the desk. “I’m enhancing and speeding up the replay,” Petra said tensely. Her excitement was contagious; I could feel my heart skip a beat and found I was holding my breath. “Look left of center, just below Sol’s equator. See that little bump of darker light?”

  “Yes,” I said, my voice sounding hollow.

  “That’s Area 378, the one Hewie Seven has been keeping an eye on, the one you called about. Watch what happens.”

  The bump expanded, slowly, one could almost say carefully, into a white-gold teardrop running down the face of the sun. It was totally unlike the pictures of the ragged, tentacle-like spots and flares I was accustomed to seeing. This shape was a clearly defined spheroid of light, even in color and opaque. As we watched, the teardrop slid free, its yellow glow changing to become a cold, clear blue as it sped into space on a course that was anything but random. It grew steadily larger in the viewscreen.

  I tried to say something. Nothing came out but a hoarse croak. I tried again. “Petra?”

  Hewie Seven’s rerun dissolved, to be replaced by Petra’s face. “Yes?”

  “Is it my imagination or is that thing headed straight for us?”

  And she said softly, “It’s not your imagination.”

  I swallowed hard and looked around the room. Everyone was wearing identical, stunned expressions. “When?”

  She glanced down at her console and did some quick figuring, her lips moving. When she looked up her eyes were brighter and her voice was strained. “I estimate arrival in thirteen minutes, twelve seconds.”

  “Arrival or impact?” I blurted, and wished I hadn’t.

  “How fast?” Simon said from beside me.

  “As near as I can figure, this thing pulled free of Sol seventeen minutes ago.” Her voice dropped, as if she thought that if she mumbled her next words maybe no one would jump up and shout “Liar!” “That makes it two A.U.s per hour.”

  “Or a billion or so klicks,” Simon said beside me in a dispassionate voice. “Per hour. Not bad.” He sat back, frowning. “It’s not quite FTL but it’s a start. Archy, switch over to Ford and display the incoming traffic remotes.”

  There was no reply. Petra’s face stayed on the viewer.

  “Archy? Archy, answer up.”

  At the continued silence Simon’s face flushed with the first rage I had ever seen him display toward a machine, or toward anyone or anything other than Charlie for that matter. “I’ve had about enough of this! Back Door, Frankenstein’s Monster, disengage personality banks and load Doctor Vic now!”

  Petra’s startled image promptly faded from the viewer. We were left staring at a mute, blank screen. Simon cursed fluently with no effect and his fingers began dancing over the keyboard.

  “What’s happening? What’s going on?” I heard Charlie saying. Her voice rose to a scream. “Elizabeth!”

  One moment standing close to her mother, her hand knotted in the leg of Charlie’s pants, in the next Elizabeth had vanished. Simon started forward as Charlie dropped to her knees, her hands grasping at empty air.

  “Star! Look out!” While our attention was focused on Elizabeth and Charlie, Grays and Emily had managed to pull free of the tape that bound their hands and jumped Rex to struggle over possession of the laser pistol he had in one hand. The pistol fired and Emily cried out. It fired again and Paddy slumped to the floor. Grays caught the stock as it slipped from Emily’s slack grasp and jabbed Rex viciously in the gut. The air went out of Rex with a large whoof and his grip on Lodge’s arm slackened. The barrel of the pistol began to turn toward me. I stood stupidly where I was, unable to move.

  “Star, get down!” Caleb shouted. In a single move so smooth it looked preplanned, Caleb tossed his rifle to Roger and reached out to separate Grays from Rex with one efficient yank. Without bothering to relieve him of the pistol, Caleb got his hands around Lodge’s neck.

  Still standing where I was, mute and incapable of action, I watched Caleb’s shoulders bunch and the muscles in his massive upper arms bulge out with the strain. When it came, the snap of the commodore’s spine was clearly audible to everyone in the room. Anger and incredulity fought for dominance on his contorted face as the life oozed out of Grayson Cabot Lodge the Fourth. He managed to gasp out my name. “Star, I…” He strained to look up at me. And then, nothing.

  His body crumpled to the floor, all the vitality oozing out of it, until there was nothing left but an awkward, lifeless heap of silver and black.

  Caleb retrieved the sonic rifle from Roger, reset it to stun, and began calmly and methodically putting the rest of the Patrolmen in the room to sleep, one at a time.

  I knelt next to Paddy, who was clutching her shattered side with both hands as her life’s blood oozed from between her fingers to run in tiny rivulets across the floor. “Paddy?”

  Her eyes opened and the ghost
of a twinkle lingered there. “Keep your hands from my poteen,” she said in a slurred voice. “You bloody Eskimo. You haven’t the taste to appreciate the gift God gave to a thirsty Ireland.” The twinkle faded and her eyelids slid down.

  “Paddy? Paddy!” I looked around. “Charlie, get over here!”

  Charlie was still staring numbly at the space where Elizabeth wasn’t. I jumped up and shook her, hard, until her head bounced back on her shoulders. “Snap out of it, Charlie. Take care of Paddy. Now!” My sister’s eyes came back into focus. After a moment she nodded a shaken assent and went to where Paddy lay.

  I wheeled and yelled at Caleb, “Just what the hell do you think you were doing?”

  The last Patrolman folded up with a silly grin on her face. Caleb looked at me, unmoved. “Saving your life.”

  “Thanks a lot! You’ve just condemned Ellfive to retaliatory strikes by the Space Patrol and probably single-handedly stopped all support by the American Alliance dead in the water! You did know who this man was, didn’t you?”

  “I know he was trying to kill you. I know he would have if I hadn’t killed him first.”

  “There is more at stake here than just my life!”

  Caleb took one step forward. I found myself lifted by the scruff of my neck and shaken like a dog. “Not to me, there isn’t.”

  Simon, his face paper white, was nevertheless calmer than either of us when he spoke. “You’ve forgotten something, Star.”

  I tore myself out of Caleb’s grasp and rounded on my brother-in-law. “What’s that? What have I missed besides the fact that we have just fired on Fort Sumter?”

  “You’ve forgotten the fighters the Space Patrol came in. Not to mention the shuttles.”

  At first all I could do was splutter. “Today’s great thought, Simon?” I said, when I could. “What do you want to do, take over the fleet and attack Orientale on Luna? Then what? Do we move in on GEO Base and after that Terra? Don’t be idiotic.”

  “No.” There was enough grim purpose in his tone to halt me in midshout. “If we can secure those ships, I was thinking more along the lines of self-defense. Self-defense, Star,” he repeated, and held up one hand. “No. Shut up and think about it for one minute.”