by Wil McCarthy
Best face forward, then. Make it look good.
She cleared her throat.
“Mr. President. Although your threats have scant meaning for me, the fact that you resort to them shows me how deeply your convictions run. I believe I understand your position. Once we've completed the retrieval of our crewmates, Introspectia will proceed with all possible haste to the vicinity of Unua. We will then do what we can to assist you. I hope you find this satisfactory.”
And fuck you, history, she wanted to add, but did not.
~~~
Asia gripped the arms of her seat as Port Chrysanthemum trembled. Like a quake that never quite ended, the shaking rose and fell in intensity, produced sounds that were louder at some times and softer at others.
“Structural failure in the docking port,” someone called in through her office door. “The rivets are popping!”
“Fine,” she called back, though she knew full well that it was not fine at all. After four centuries of slow modification, Port Chrysanthemum had almost as much in common with the city of Verva as it did with the spaceship it once had been. The rumbling antimatter engines could produce no more than a twentieth of a gee along the spin axis, hardly significant by propulsive standards. And yet, this twentieth of a gee fell perpendicular to the centripetal “down” so much of the port had been designed for, like stiff wind through old and fragile trees. Things were breaking all over.
She could only hope that nothing important broke loose, that the hull did not burst, that the superstructure did not lose axial integrity and collapse the whole ship like empty gourd.
On the holie, Verva looked small and distant. Funny; for so long the planet had hung there, rotating slowly but seeming otherwise not to move. Then, as the acceleration began to pile up into serious delta-velocity, Verva had suddenly begun to shrink. Now, she felt she could almost watch the changes with her eyes. Well, maybe not quite.
They had broken away from Unua orbit, though, and leaped out onto ellipse that circled giant Vano, ellipse that stretched and widened each moment as the engines continued to fire. At this rate they would reach cold, airless Dua in thirty-five hours. And then... well, she didn't want to think that far ahead.
It occurred to her, suddenly, that she had fulfilled her childhood dream, earning the title of starship captain. On the very tub she'd administered for the past eighty years! Her destination might be somewhat closer than the stars, but that couldn't be helped. And anyway, she'd long ago left childhood behind.
“Asia, the reactor is still running much too hot.”
She sighed. “I see. Did you open the coolant valves all the way?”
The young woman, Lisa Jan, nodded. “Yes, we did. But there isn't enough coolant to fill the entire system. We've got these big air pockets circling through the pipes, and every time they cross the reactor the temperature jumps another half a degree.”
Asia fought back anger. So her starship was misbegotten and klugey. No one had ever expected it to move at all!
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Siphon water out of the waste recycling systems—clean water, mind you—and add it slowly to the coolant.”
“I don't know how we'd cross couple those systems,” Jan protested.
“Find a way!”
“Yes, ma'am.” Jan turned, stomped off to her duties.
And so it went for a while. The image of Unua was distinctly smaller now, and the edge of Vano had begun to creep into view. In a few hours, Unua would be a dot on the brown dwarf's smoldering face.
Later, it seemed to her that the shuddering of Starship Chrysanthemum had begun to intensify. She paused, looking around her office-cum-bridge, watching the walls vibrate around her. Yes, it had definitely gotten stronger!
Fumbling at the telkom which was her viewport holie, she punched controls, paged Lisa Jan. There was a pause, and then:
“Yes? Lisa Jan here. Yes?” There was no picture.
“What the hell is going on?” Asia demanded.
“We added water to the coolant loop,” Jan said quickly. “But it burst! One of the lines burst! Reactor temperature is really climbing now.”
Asia pounded a fist on her desk. “Darkness, woman, I told you to add it slowly! The cooling oil is over five hundred degrees, it'll turn water to instant steam! What the hell is wrong with you?”
“We did add it slowly, Asia.” Lisa Jan sounded offended. “Ten cc's a second. That pipe must have been about to split anyway. Oh no, the reactor walls are melting! Darkness! Shut it down! Shut it down!”
This last was directed, not at Asia, but at someone behind and away from the telkom Jan was using.
Asia leaned forward. “Have we lost containment?”
No answer. The other end was a chaos of shouts, machine-noises, distant alarms.
“HAVE WE LOST CONTAINMENT!”
A new voice, unfamiliar. “The reactor is ruined, we're shutting it down. Antimatter containment is intact.”
She breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay. Okay. Who is this? What do you mean when you say 'ruined?'“
The shuddering of Starship Chrysanthemum rose to a new peak, and then suddenly ceased.
The silence came as a shock, like a physical blow that left Asia weakened and empty.
“Uh,” said the voice on the other side of the telkom. “Hello? Yeah, little melted pieces of it are floating out the back.”
“I see. How long before it can be repaired?”
The voice barked out a sort of laugh. “Is this Asia Gill?”
“Yes.”
“Uh, Madam Director, the reactor core looks like grilled cheese on toast. Nobody's going to be fixing it any time soon.”
Asia felt tickly sensations in the pit of her stomach. “But... We're out in the middle of nowhere. How are we supposed to get out of here?”
The voice on the other end declined to respond.
~~~
“Jafre, I think the battle is coming closer, and we're just hanging here dead. Can you send Introspectia out here to rescue us? Can you send anybody out here to rescue us?”
Thanks to the light-lag, Jafre's image took several seconds to respond. “I'll see what I can do. I think Introspectia is still hanging around at Malsato. There's one ship in orbit right now, but they seem to be low on fuel or something. They were very upset when they learned Port Chrysanthemum had been moved.”
“We have no shielding out here. I've got most everyone holed up between the water tanks, but I'm not sure how much good that'll do. Please, come get us as soon as you can.”
After the usual pause, Jafre grimaced. “Nobody's coming to grief if I can help it, Asia, but you've got hundreds of people up there. Even if I can get hold of this ship, it can't take everyone. What's it going to do, push the whole station?”
“Introspectia could do that. I'm sure of it.”
Jafre's face was serious. “There's no way Introspectia is going to reach you before the eggies do. I don't think anyone can reach you before then.”
“Darkness!” She pounded her desk. “Damnation! These 'eggies' are a threat to public safety. I'm ordering them destroyed.”
Pause. “I was thinking the same thing. But how? Pull alongside them with mining lasers? They're made of centrokrist, how are we supposed to hurt them?”
“Damn it, we'll just drop stuff in their path. They can't always steer so good, we've seen that.”
Pause. “Asia, my light. The eggies have ignored us up to now. Is it a good idea to stir them up?”
“Sit up here and ask me that,” she fumed. “How many people are dead already? Those exhaust plumes are half million kilometers long, and maybe ten thousand wide, and in a few hours we could have dozens of them swinging around Vano like planet-sized welding torches. They could hit you, they could hit me, they could hit the stations on Dua...” She paused, glaring at him with all her fury unveiled. “They have no right to do this. We've worked hard in this system, it's ours. They have no right to be here.”
Pause. Long pause. �
�That strikes a chord,” Jafre finally said. “Indeed, who do these... people think they are? I'll talk to Chelsea, you talk to our own ships. If we can hurt the eggies, or at least frighten them away from the inhabited areas, we should start immediately.”
“Agreed,” she said in her best official tone.
The telkom went blank.
Chapter Twenty
Miguel sat up suddenly. What was that noise? Like a giant hammer had pounded a metal plate, once, firmly. He looked around.
The light had gone. The white glow of Malsato's halo had vanished from the viewport, replaced with blank blackness. Not even starry blackness, but a total void. A few lights winked here and there inside the lander, driven by capacitors that had not yet failed, and these reflected from the viewport as if from a shiny black mirror.
He tried to scratch his mouth in puzzlement, and then knew a stronger puzzlement when he felt the mask there. But yes, he remembered, the first aid kit had made them put on gas filter masks when the air circulator's main capacitor cut out and the backup switched in.
“Don't worry,” it had said. “Between the masks and the remaining capacitor power, you can easily survive another six days.” That news had not exactly comforted them.
SlamClang! That noise again, real, not something he'd dreamed or imagined!
He shook Beth awake.
“Mnuh?” she said through the filter mask.
“Wake up,” he said quietly. “Something's going on here. I don't know what.”
She sat up, the emergency blanket spilling down around her. “What? What? Who is that?”
“Shh!”
“Oh.” Quieter. “Oh, Miguel. You startled me. What happened to the light?”
“I don't know.”
SlamClang!
Beth was staring at the blank viewport. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I see rivets out there. That's the inside of the docking blister! Miguel, Introspectia's come and picked us up!”
Hurriedly, she took up an edge of the blanket again and pulled it against her, covering her breasts in the dimness.
Just in time.
With a new, different banging noise, the inner and outer doors of the airlock unlatched themselves, one sliding upward, the other down. Yellow light spilled in around silhouetted figures.
“Confirmed, they are alive,” one of the figures said, in a masculine voice that rang with amusement. “They're, um, also naked.”
Miguel sat stupidly in the wash of light, not moving, feeling his skin turn hot with embarrassment.
“Acknowledged,” said another voice, also amused. “I'll inform the bridge.”
“First Mate Peng has received serious injuries,” Beth said, coldly, to the men as they entered. “Stop gawking and take him down to the infirmary.”
~~~
Dade stuck his head into the science niche and grinned humorlessly at Tom. “Secure your equipment,” he said.
Tom looked up from the spectrograph to which he'd devoted his attentions since Yezu... since... “Huh?” he inquired.
“Secure your equipment. We've been ordered to move out and intercept the eggies. We've been ordered to destroy them.”
Tom blinked. “What?”
“Please secure your equipment, Doctor. A cluster of ellipsoids will pass near here in just over an hour, headed for the inhabited planets. Captain Vitter intends to put us in their way.”
“I... see,” Tom said.
Dade nodded somberly. “Yeah. Tomus, I... yeah.”
He turned and left.
~~~
Chelsea gaped at the holie screen. You want me to what, you puffed-up little fool?
But the message continued. “I realize you won't take orders from me. I realize you'll object to the very idea of this. But listen to me, Captain, I've got five million people who are maybe about to get fried. Please, I'm asking you, please intercept the aliens. Turn your engines on them, melt them down! You are the only one who can help us right now.”
Turn your engines on them. Melt them down.
Good lord, did he really expect this of her? To fire on an alien intelligence, to attempt the destruction of something so obviously valuable and important, something with which she hadn't established even the most fleeting of contact? That would be insane, criminal. The eyes of history would never forgive her, nor would she ever forgive herself.
She configured the holie for a reply, configured herself, her inhuman softlinked face and her all-too-human voice.
“No,” she said, simply, and turned the holie off.
She would rendezvous with the aliens, yes, but peacefully. She would make them listen to her, make them understand her.
Through the link, she signaled for data from the tracking systems. State vectors of all known ellipsoids? Identify slow movers. Identify those with low accelerations. There. Yes, and there, and there was well. Ah hah. She rerouted the data through to Navigator Jones.
“Lay in an intercept course at maximum acceleration,” she said aloud to him. “That cluster right there.” She indicated, linkwise, which cluster she meant. After looping around through the empty quarters of Malhela system, this group would soon pass by the Centromo debris field on their way toward the brown dwarf and its planets. Assuming nothing changed too remarkably in their behavior, of course.
Their acceleration seemed surprisingly low, only about fifteen gee's, and they did not obviously pursue or flee from any of the other ellipsoids. A stately patrol, then, perhaps open to communication. If she dared to reactivate the conversion fields with thrusters on full, she could bring Introspectia in on a tangent to their course, and hang within visual range for several minutes before dropping behind.
She transmitted the gist of this thought to Navigator Jones, as well.
“Yes, Ma'am,” Jones replied. “Course laid in.”
Everything became a little heavier. And a little heavier still.
“Activate conversion fields.”
“Activated.”
“Full power.”
“Full power.”
One gee. Two gee's. Three. Three point two. Three point two three.
“Maximum acceleration, Captain.”
Chelsea nodded politely. “Thank you, Jones, I can read the instruments. I can feel it, too.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
~~~
Useless, redundant, without a task to perform, Tom sat and listened to the chatter on Wedge's interkom circuits.
“Approaching intercept point.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Engaging secondary reaction control.”
“Starboard thruster 2AS not responding.”
“Acknowledged. Switching autopilot configuration.”
“Affirmative. Lock.”
It went on like that, without pausing or changing in character. The operation of Wedge seemed inordinately complex to Tom, a few small capabilities divided into myriad subsystems and sub-subsystems, each requiring at least one operator while the ship traveled. During mining operations, he understood, many of the crewmates switched stations, or reconfigured the stations they had, to perform a largely different set of tasks. But still the ship required all of them, or nearly all of them, to function properly. And of course, they could all use a pick and shovel when necessary, and on occasion this did occur.
Strange. He felt sure that a ship like Introspectia could get by with only one or two crewmates, that the presence of dozens owed more to tradition than to necessity. Well, during emergencies he supposed it would help to have a lot of extra hands. And, probably, the passengers required more direct and careful attention than the starship itself.
Wedge, it seemed, had no extra hands standing by for emergencies, and of course it had no effective means of dealing with passengers, as he and Yezu had come to know well.
Ah, Yezu.
At least you had a window, my friend. At least you could see the thing that ended your life. Damn, how Tom wished for the same luxury! Instead, he lay here in his bunk, out of eve
ryone's way like a self-acknowledged piece of animated uselessness... Bah. Death would come for him unannounced.
Tom did not believe in an afterlife, did not believe he'd wake up, blinking and confused, in a cloudy heaven somewhere. His life would simply end, so swiftly that he would never even know he had died. Like a stage drama with the last scene cut out, the lights suddenly and meaninglessly extinguished, cutting the actors off in mid-sentence. Worse than that, even, for once his curtain had dropped he wouldn't ever realize he'd lived at all.
Such futility. Such damned futility. For this he had crossed the ocean of stars.
“Anomalous readings on the radar,” an interkom voice warned.
“Acknowledged.”
“Telescope lock achieved. Tracking targets.”
Tom felt his heart beating faster. The moment of truth inched closer!
“Visual contact!”
“Visual contact confirmed.”
“Plotting trajectory solutions.”
“Acknowledged.”
What did Yezu know, in those final fleeting moments? Did everything fall into place for him, his life flashing before his eyes, snapping into focus, becoming a whole, clear entity for the first and final time? Had he simply stared, his mind a blank?
“I get multiple solutions.”
“Have you eliminated imaginary roots?”
“Affirmative. I'm still getting multiple solutions.”
“Update observations.”
“Telescope tracking update.”
“Solution lock. Solution lock. Intercept coordinates to follow.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Coordinates received.”
“Dump the hold! Dump the hold!”
Wedge shivered for a moment, and Tom heard the sound of the cargo hatches blasting open, dumping their load of Centromo gravel.
“Dumped.”
“Initiate escape trajectory.”
