The Professor got an eyeful. It was a tiny moonlet, cutting through the upper edge of the foggy atmosphere, churning up a flat wake in its path.
The Exec dismissed it. "Ah, it's just one of the minor moons of Saturn. We've already seen a dozen of 'em."
Morfett turned an impatient gaze on Karrol. Then he said, "…All the others were above us."
"Well, this one's below us. It looks kinda pretty down there, stirring up the atmospheric blanket like that."
"I'm happy it speaks to your artistic sensibilities, Pat. How about your suspension of disbelief?"
"Eh?" Karrol said. Jack Flynn leaned forward with new interest. Obviously Morfett was up to something.
"What would happen to this ship if we were rolling through that soup without power?"
"Why," Karrol answered, "we'd fall down."
Morfett's face took on an expression combining exasperation and superiority. "So what's holding that moon up?"
THE STRANGE LITTLE moon rolled across the heavens as Thetis closed on it. Inside, Flynn had sounded General Quarters, and everyone but Morfett was at his battle station: Flynn in the Captain's chair, Karrol at navigation, White in the radio shack, Armstrong in the pilot's seat, and Marshal Webbe at the weapons station. Hale and Scammera, Engineering and Maintenance, were strapped in recliners on B deck. Morfett stood at Karrol's side.
"It's moving at an amazing speed for a natural satellite, skipper," Karrol commented.
"Soundings show it's got a major hollow area just below the surface," White added.
Karrol continued. "Mean diameter thirty-five miles, nearly spherical. Looks like major demolition on one side to remove irregularities."
Morfett nodded thoughtfully. "It can't possibly not be man-made. It must represent a tremendous investment in money and time."
Something suddenly occurred to Jack Flynn. "Boys, I think we're looking at Astra Nova!"
Everyone's attention perked up at that. "Astra Nova" was an all but legendary fortress, the secret retreat of the Tortuga gang and hideout for pirates from all over the system. The one advantage the pirates had over the Service was this secret stronghold.
And here it was. It couldn't be a coïncidence. Pirates had kidnapped the new Princess, and the trail led to this suspicious moon.
"Take us planetside and bring us in," Flynn ordered.
Thetis dipped into the peasoup atmosphere, arcing under the moon and hurtling across its surface. The ship stirred up a roil of clouds as she flew. Then, abruptly, Thetis broke out of the Saturnian atmosphere. Not far ahead, a low range of hills rose from the curved landscape.
"It's in there," Karrol announced.
As they approached, a great gap became visible, soon resolving itself into hangar doors, wide open.
"Anything moving, Pat?" Flynn asked.
"Something just left the screen a moment ago. But there's nothing else within RADAR range now."
"Well, if this ain't a trap, my name's not Jack Flynn. Wild Bill, arm the big gun."
Webbe touched a lever. "Armed. Whaddawe gonna do?"
"There's only one thing to do with a trap."
"I shudder to ask."
Flynn looked grim. "Spring it. Everybody check their sidearms. We're going in."
Thetis slowly drifted in through the hangar doors, all crewmembers on alert. Inside, they found a cavernous ship-dock, with tremendous maneuvering room. Parked along the side-walls was an assortment of space vehicles, all run-down looking. Cargo ships, pinnaces, and one fair-to-middling copy of Thetis. The landing stage was unoccupied.
Flynn and Webbe exchanged puzzled glances. What was going on here?
Then the radio barked. "Ahoy, Thetis." White punched up a screen view of the bulkhead near the landing stage.
There was a large Benedictus-glass window beside the airlock hatch. Something was wrong with it. The window was cracked, spider-web lines radiating from an object sticking through a small hole burned through the material. White brought up a closer view.
The object was a broom handle.
The radio chirped again. "Thetis? Do you read me? This is Her Grace, Allesandra Pendragon. I need you to get the brig ready. I've got about a dozen prisoners here that need attention."
The crew of Thetis exchanged stunned stares.
SIX HOURS LATER, the new Princess was at last aboard her assigned vessel. Two more Service ships had arrived to take charge of the captured moon.
It had taken awhile to sort things out, but it was eventually established that the girl was indeed who she claimed to be, and that she really had single-handedly captured the pirate stronghold Astra Nova.
When she had fired at the window, the security system had immediately reacted to the breach. Atmosphere began to escape and the pirates had panicked. But even as the big window began to crack from the pressure, Sandy had grabbed up the broom and jammed it into the hole, plugging it effectively.
The breach was closed. The window held. But the alarms kept going. So did many of the pirates.
Morgas got away, and so did the twenty or so of his henchmen who had made it to his ship before he fled, leaving the big hangar doors open to vacuum. The others had been penned up in the airlock, and surrendered rather than die.
Webbe had taken charge, and summoned reinforcements.
A commendation had already come in for Sandy from Wallace.
Flynn, Webbe, and Morfett were in the Ward Room with Sandy, talking over drinks, coffee for the men, cocoa for Her Grace.
Flynn was unhappy, to say the least.
"You must be the luckiest woman in the universe, sister."
Sandy smirked back at him. "No. If I was, I'd never have been assigned to this ship."
"I suppose you're right. After all, Morgas got away."
"Well, perhaps if you'd arrived a little earlier... ."
Webbe laughed. "I think you'll fit in here just fine, Your Grace."
"Skipper," came Pat's voice, "we're cleared to leave."
Flynn set down his cup and started out. "Be right there."
Sandy and Marshal Webbe followed. As Pat vacated Flynn's seat, he asked, "So, Skipper. What is your name?"
Flynn took his chair and gave Karrol a puzzled look.
"You said if it wasn't a trap your name wasn't Jack Flynn."
"Oh," Jack said. "It was a trap – just not a trap for us."
"Whenever you're ready, Skipper," mentioned the pilot.
Jack turned to Sandy. "Lady, please go to your quarters."
Sandy glowered in response. "Captain, if we're going to work together on a friendly basis, you can call me ‘Sandy’. Otherwise, it'd better be ‘Your Grace’."
"We'll work that out later. Right now I want to blast off."
"Go right ahead."
Flynn shook his head in frustration, and turned to the pilot. He gestured, and Thetis rumbled away from the pirate moon and into space. Sandy stood proudly on the bridge deck, like some eighteenth-century midshipman.
Jack stole a glance. She looked good, and she'd done good. Maybe she'd work out after all.
Book Two
SUNSET OR DEATH
Chapter One
City in the Dark
"GIVE US THE graphic, Pat," Jack Flynn ordered. On the big viewscreen that occupied the forward bulkhead of the command deck, a flat view of the inner solar system replaced the nose camera picture.
At the lower right, a quarter of the disc of the sun anchored the image. Moving to the left, arcs indicating the orbits of Icarus, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars sliced up the screen. Small imperfect circles defined the paths of Earth's moon, the satellites of Mars, and Service orbiters.
One long dotted line reached from the upper left halfway across the screen, with a beacon icon at its right end. This marked the location of Captain Jack Flynn, not to mention the ship in which he sat.
His Majesty's Space Ship, the corvette-class Thetis, arced gracefully and silently through space. Almost directly ahead was the furious ball of nuclear fi
re known peremptorily to Earthmen as The Sun.
Inside, in the Captain's chair, Flynn snapped a new order. "Bring up Mercury and its umbra."
The image zoomed in, and the icon for Mercury, after all these centuries still the symbol for the antique Roman deity, appeared on its orbital track. A small black cone was drawn in on the far side of the circle from the sun.
"Update the computer," Flynn concluded.
Patric Karrol, Exec, co-pilot, and, more to the point at the moment, astral navigator, complied with the final order, feeding the data to the Helm, while Dave Armstrong, the pilot, verified and filed the information. Now when he guided the ship to its next landing, he would have fresh plotting from which to work.
Thetis was moving in on one of the few tricky flight-paths left in the system, dropping down to the planet Mercury. Anyone who thinks there's no up or down in space has never tried to fly near the sun. It's a tricky path into the star's gravity well, and a tough climb out again, and only the planet Mercury makes it possible.
Downhill, the tiny sphere zoomed around its primary, casting a shadow in which visiting spacecraft could hide from the solar radiance. The computer had compared current planetary positions to Ephemeridal tables, and plotted the descent into, as it were, the valley of the shadow.
BY THE YEAR twenty-one thirteen, such trips had become, though not frequent, routine. Cargo and passenger services arc about the solar system, and a few even pursue deep-space voyages beyond lonely Neptune. Frontier settlements exist on several worlds, and asteroids are tapped by miners.
Though the nations of Earth exist autonomously, free space is controlled, by mutual agreement of Earth and its ally Sangar, by The Empire, one-time entertainment and Justice organization which had developed into a supra-national Justice-enforcement entity. From its headquarters in Hollywood, The Empire directs the activities of Star Service, the extraplanetary Justice force.
From a space station and a fleet of rockets such as Thetis, Star Service strives to maintain the balance of law and order in the twenty-second century.
BELOW, AMIDSHIPS ON the B deck of the corvette, a tallish woman in an unusual silver-grey dress had paused to water some flowers. Long planters bordered the central corridor on each deck, displaying an assortment of pansies, orchids, woodbine, Eidelweiss, and a lot of ferns. Flanking a door marked with a coronet were two trays of the singular pale-blue rose known as "the Imperial".
The woman was one of the most important people in the universe, though you'd hardly think it to look at her. Sandy-blonde hair, pretty and unassuming, bright eyes and a winning smile, she looked like a movie star or corporate executive. But she was in fact Her Grace, Space Princess Allesandra, though her friends called her Sandy Pendragon. As a Space Princess, her duties were similar to those of a circuit judge in the Old West, but on an interplanetary scale.
Leaving the watering can outside her door, Sandy entered her cabin, and crossed to the walk-in wardrobe. She removed her uniform jacket, and made herself comfortable before crossing back to a piece of furniture that combined the functions of a desk, vanity, and computerized entertainment center.
Inserting a spool of film into a slot, she picked up a remote-control clicker and sat down in the contour reclining chair beside the desk. Space this close to the Sun was super-charged across the entire spectrum, and radio-activity precluded ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communications. Even with the magnetic cocoon generated by the Thanhouser turbine between decks, it was a hard place for humans and a tough place for electronic equipment. Ship’s instruments were well shielded, but subsidiary systems used too little space to justify bulky protection. Any ship venturing to Mercury had to forego the digital entertainment, substituting good old twentieth-century mechanically operated analog filmed entertainment – or in this case, an educational picture.
Settling back, she clicked the clicker at a screen which levered down from a ceiling panel, then clicked at the computer.
A documentary-film title appeared on the screen:
"GOING LIKE A BOMB"
AS THE FILM rolled, a narrator explained the graphics and photos depicted. It informed her of a lot of stuff she already knew, such as Mercury's position in the system, how the world was known to the ancients, and how even into the twentieth century it was thought to always show the same face to the sun.
Then, as the story continued, it got into things she didn't know, or had at least forgotten since junior high school, such as the mean distance from the sun – thirty-six million miles – and the diameter – three thousand thirty miles, about two-fifths of Earth's. She recalled that the period of revolution was eighty-eight days, while the "day" was one hundred seventy-six times the length of an Earth day. The atmosphere, she learned, was vanishingly thin, but comprised of sodium, helium, hydrogen, and oxygen. With the sunlight some seven times stronger than on Earth, temperatures could reach eight hundred degrees (Sandy hoped that was Fahrenheit: the narrator didn't say).
Though the surface was very much like the Moon, the core was iron, like Earth's, giving Mercury a noticeable magnetic field, which was sharply candled by the bow shock wave of the solar wind. With the same density as Earth, Mercury's mass results in an effective weight of thirty-eight pounds per hundred Earth weight.
"In the year twenty-two one, history's most ambitious feat of engineering was begun," the voice picked up a new topic. Over shots of space-suited workers digging a trench, installing metal plates, hauling huge solar-collector panels, the narrator explained, "At thirty degrees north latitude, a metal rail was laid, circling the entire globe. Originally planned for an equatorial path, the right-of-way was re routed to minimize damage to the Hermetic surface.
"Working always on the night side, for the heat of the day is far too great for even protective suits, men labored for nine years to produce this metal band. Coated with a highly-polished reflective surface, this track survives the horrible heat and the terrible cold of the Hermetic rotation.
"Every fifty thousand meters, this track is bracketed by banks of solar collectors, which during the long Hermetic day absorb fantastic amounts of energy from the nearby star. Stored in underground batteries, this energy is put to important use.
"For the purpose of this rail is to provide a pathway for a creation unique in our solar system, Cinnabar, the city on wheels!"
Now against depictions of what looked like a collection of office buildings and walled streets being assembled, the voice told how Cinnabar was put together, pressurized, tested, re-tested, and finally inhabited, mostly by Earth people, but also by several Sangans, the strange amorphous beings from a satellite of the star once known as Spica.
In Cinnabar, various experiments and observations were carried out, not the least of which was a test to see how well men could function in such an environment.
For as the city chugged along, re-charging its own power from those solar cells, it perpetually chased the sunset. Daytime being inimical to life on Mercury, and night-time being little better, the city cruised along just a few hours behind the line of demarcation, alone in the dark.
"Rolling across the vast Planitia Caloris as well as skirting Odin, Sobkow, Miksta, and other plains, the right-of-way diverts slightly to bypass Endevour Rupes, a prominent ridge that marks the only major discontinuity of the surface along the thirtieth north parallel. While much of the surface is pocked or buckled by meteoric and tectonic action, the relative smoothness of the plains allowed the right-of-way to be laid with minimum damage to the Mercurian surface.
"Like the frontier cities on Mars and the orbiting satellite of Venus," the voice went on, "Cinnabar is operated under the authority of The Empire" – you could hear the capital letters even when spoken – "and administered by Star Service. The populace is made up chiefly of scientists and laborers, with not much in between. A small staff of civic officials, plus merchants and entertainers, makes up the remainder of the population. One deputy sky marshal handles the infrequent criminal problems, and circuit Spa
ce Princesses administer civil and criminal Justice.
"Unlike the other worlds, Mercury, due to the harshness of its environment, is unlikely to grow to a population entitled to pray for autonomy. In the years since the Cinnabar project was begun, no additional city projects have begun, and only one has been planned, Maya, an underground complex to be sited near crater Hun Kal, the "Greenwich of Mercury".
"In short, then," the narrator concluded, "Mercury is not a nice place to visit, and it's a worse place to live."
Sandy's eyebrows went up. Apparently this had not been intended as a travelogue!
PRESENTLY, SANDY WENT up to the Command Deck, where her shipmates were preparing for what they called "the dive". As she stood at the top of the two steps up from A Deck, in the entry arch, she fixated on the forward viewscreen, at the moment showing a filtered view of old Sol. Centered against this flaming disc was a soft-edged circle of solid black.
To her right, Sky Marshal "Wild Bill" Webbe sat at his action station, the gun controls showing on his instrument panel, though there was no likelihood of trouble at the moment.
He caught Sandy's attention with a wave, and asked, "You gonna watch from here?"
Hardly looking away from the screen, she nodded. Webbe touched a stud on the after bulkhead, causing a concealed chair to fold out of the wall.
Peter White stood up from his seat on Sandy's far side, escorting the mesmerized Space Princess to the spare chair. Then Peter returned to his station, and touched a "call" button.
"All crew to stations," he said. His voice echoed from speakers aft and below, "Mercury insertion underway."
In other parts of the small corvette, the members of the crew not on the Command Deck made sure everything was properly battened down, and went to the Ward Room, aft on A Deck.
Pat and Dave sat at their stations. Just at the moment they had nothing to do but watch graphic readouts on their consoles. Dave Armstrong, who never trusted "George" the auto-pilot any farther than he was forced to, held the stick lightly in his hand, letting the computer move it, but ready to grab it at the first sign of trouble.
Planet Patrol: The Interplanetary Age (Star Service Book 1) Page 4
