Chindi Page 12

  Everyone was still up when Hutch went to bed that night. In the morning, there was still nothing. And then, while several of them were having breakfast: “Terrestrial world. Clouds. Oceans. But no electronic envelope.”

  An audible sigh ran down the table.

  “It’s quiet,” Preach said.

  HUTCH LOVED THE bridge at night, when the passengers were asleep and the ship was more or less at rest. Oddly, it wasn’t at all the same when she was traveling alone. The knowledge that the others were there was somehow important, as if a tribal instinct cut in, supplying reassurance from the fact that her siblings all lay just beyond the glow of the instrument panels.

  In the dark, she smiled.

  She had stocked the cooler with an ample supply of French champagne, to be used for celebratory purposes when, and if, the Memphis succeeded in what she was trying to do. In the event of failure the champagne could be pressed into service to celebrate some other event, perhaps a birthday, or the completion of another of Tor’s sketches.

  On that last night before they were to make their jump back to sublight, Tor surprised her by showing up on the bridge. It was the first time she’d found herself alone with him since he’d come aboard. “It seems strange,” he said, “seeing you as an authority figure.”

  She tried to downplay the idea. “It’s just the job.”

  He loitered by the hatch, reluctant to enter.

  “I’ve done some art research,” she said. “You’re a professional.”

  He nodded. “Thanks. Actually, yes. I’m able to support myself now.”

  “You’ve done better than that. You’re living the life you’ve dreamed about. That doesn’t happen to very many of us.”

  “It happened to you.”

  “Not really.”

  “Didn’t you always want to pilot these things?”

  “Yes. But it turned out differently from what I’d expected.”

  “In what way?”

  “Tor, it isn’t as glamorous as it looks.”

  “It does look glamorous.” He glanced around, to be sure no one had come in, and lowered his voice. “May I tell you something?”

  Uh-oh. “Sure.”

  His gaze touched her eyes. “I was sorry to lose you.”

  She looked down at the console, uncertain how to reply.

  “I won’t bring it up again,” he said. “And I won’t do anything to make you uncomfortable. I just wanted you to know.” He looked at her for a long moment. “Good night, Hutch.”

  She watched him start for the door. “Tor,” she said.

  He turned, and she saw hope flicker. “I know this is hard on you.” She was going to add something about how she was a friend he could always count on, but it seemed dumb so she stopped. “I appreciate the attitude you’ve taken.”

  He nodded and was gone. And she realized that her last remark hadn’t been much smarter than the one she’d choked off.

  PREACH CAME BACK while they were getting ready to make their own jump. “Still no details. But it’s right in the middle of the biozone. We can see blue skies. Continents and oceans. The bishop has suggested we name it Safe Harbor. The bad news is there’s still no indication of electronic activity, and the scopes show no sign of light on the dark side. Maybe we’re still too far away. But it looks empty.”

  The picture on the screen changed to a starfield. The imager homed in on a point of light. Two points of light. “That’s it,” he continued, “as seen from the main scope. It has a big moon.”

  “Well,” George said, “he’s probably right. They’re still too far away. Or maybe it’s not even the right world. Aren’t there other places in that system?”

  Preach hadn’t said.

  “I’ll ask him when I get a chance, George,” said Hutch. “Meantime let’s have everybody buckle up and go see what we have.”

  She retired to the bridge. By the time she got there, six green lights had appeared on the transition console. Her passengers were all safely cocooned in their harnesses.

  She brought them out into sublight, at long range from 1107. Alyx and Nick both came out of the jump somewhat the worse for wear. Alyx lost her lunch and Nick swayed under a vertigo attack. Those kinds of effects were common enough. Neither had endured a problem on the way out, but transition sickness tended to be unpredictable, a hit-or-miss affair. Hutch herself still became ill on occasion.

  “Activate long-range sensors,” she told Bill.

  The screens blinked on and showed lots of stars but nothing else. Which was pretty much what you expected to see in the neighborhood of a neutron star.

  “Looks dark out there,” said Herman, from the common room. Hutch was relaying results from the telescopes onto the big wallscreens. “How far out are we?” he asked.

  “In the boonies,” said Hutch. “Eighty A.U.s from the neutron star.”

  Alyx asked how long she thought it would take to find the transmission.

  Hutch put an image of the Memphis on-screen, with its outsize antennas. “It would help if we got lucky. The transmission’s narrow, and we can’t maneuver well because it wouldn’t take much to collapse the dishes. But we have a pretty good idea where to look, and that’ll help.”

  “How can you figure out where you are? Everything here looks the same as everything else.”

  She brought up a picture of one of the satellites left by the Benny. “We use these to establish our position.”

  Alyx nodded but didn’t look as if she understood. “You didn’t tell me how long you thought it would take.”

  “If we get lucky, maybe only a couple of days.”

  “That’s the estimate they were tossing around back at the Academy,” said Pete. “When I was out here on the Benjamin Martin, the signal was damned near impossible to find. What if we don’t get lucky?”

  Four dish antennas unfolded from their holding tubes and flowered above the hull of the Memphis. Swivels turned slowly until all were fully expanded and directed toward the neutron star. In Hutch’s mind, the Memphis came to resemble an old eighteenth century ship of the line under full sail.

  “Approaching search area,” said Bill.

  “There are no guarantees,” Hutch said. “There’s just too much space out here. We can’t cover everything. But George has done a pretty decent job with the sensors and the communications equipment. We also have some satellites to put out. They’ll help us. I think, if it’s here, we’ll find it pretty quickly.”

  Bill took them through the maneuvers required by the opening phases of the search pattern with deliberation. Changing directions with the antennas deployed was like trying to turn a flatbed vehicle loaded with bowling balls.

  Hutch considered retracting the dishes at the end of each pass, but Bill ran a simulation and they concluded it meant too much wear and tear. “This system,” the AI said when she was alone, “requires some improvement.”

  They had a couple of false alarms. The neutron star threw off electromagnetic transmissions in all directions. They were in the process of trying to match several of them with the target signal when Bill announced a transmission from the Condor.

  “We’ve found two more worlds,” Preach said, answering George’s question. “But neither is in the biozone. They’re both close, but off the money. One will be a desert; the other’s a chunk of ice and rock.

  “By the way, did I tell you Safe Harbor’s moon is almost a quarter the size of the planet? We can make out an atmosphere. It looks thin, but it’s there.

  “Wait a second, Hutch.” He turned away, listened to someone standing off to one side of the imager, and looked surprised. Hutch saw him say, You’re sure?

  There was more nodding, more conversation. He looked out of the screen at her. “I’ll be right back, Hutch,” he told her. Then she was looking at his empty chair.

  He was gone a couple of minutes. When he reclaimed his seat his blue eyes were gleaming. “There’s a lunar outpost of some sort. Hutch, I think we’ve struck gold.”
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br />   Hutch relayed the transmission throughout the ship, and a few moments later heard cheers. For his part, Preach was getting slapped on the back, and somebody thrust a drink into his hand. A coil of paper spiraled through the air.

  “I’ll get back to you,” he said, “when we have more.”

  WITHIN A FEW minutes the excitement had given way to a sense of having been left out. “That’s where we should have gone,” Nick told Hutch. “We backed the wrong dog.”

  They wasted no time settling whose fault it was. “I thought this was our best bet,” George said. “We knew that whatever’s here is currently active. I really didn’t think they’d find anything over there.” He looked stricken. “You’re right,” he told Herman. “I blew this one.”

  While they were all feeling simultaneously ecstatic and sorry for themselves, one of the dishes tore loose from its mount. Hutch took a go-pack and went outside to do repairs, but she’d just begun to apply the patch when Bill informed her there was another transmission from the Condor. “Allcom,” she said. That would make it available to her passengers, as well.

  Preach was visibly excited. “There’s vegetation on the planet,” he said. “And we can see structures. Cities. Canals, maybe. No sign of anything in orbit yet. The moon has water, I think. But it’s probably not a living world.”

  She finished up, climbed down, and went inside. They were all waiting for her. They looked as if they’d decided enough was enough. “How long would it take us to get there?” George asked.

  “A few hours. Is that what you want to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course we are.”

  Herman looked as if he’d just lost heavily at an all-night card game, Alyx gazed intently at Hutch as if she’d taken them to the wrong place, Tor stared into that middle distance he examined whenever things went wrong. Even Pete, who maybe should have known better, was wearing a frown. Only Nick seemed unfazed. But, she thought, dealing with bad times was Nick’s specialty.

  “Okay,” she said. “We’ll get started.”

  Bill’s image appeared on an auxiliary screen directly in her line of sight. That meant he was offering her a chance to talk to him privately. But it was getting late, and she was tired. “Yes, Bill,” she asked. “What is it?”

  He was wearing a beret and smiling. Trying to cut through the general gloom, maybe. “We’ve got a hit,” he said.

  George raised a fist. Alyx fell into Herman’s arms, and Hutch witnessed a major-league mood change. They shook hands and banged one another on the back. She got a hug from Tor. He winked at her afterward. “Thought I’d take advantage,” he said.

  So they decided to stay because who knew where it might lead, and, anyway, they could only be second-best at Safe Harbor and did anyone know who captained the second mission to the Americas? (Hutch thought it was Columbus again, but she wasn’t sure enough to say anything.) She broke out the champagne, and they raised a glass to Bill, who smiled shyly, took off his beret, and said modestly that he was only doing his job.

  THE SIGNAL SEEMED to be coming directly out of 1107.

  “How much did we get?” asked Hutch.

  “Only a couple of seconds. But I know where it is. We’ll be locking on to it again in less than an hour. Then we can follow it to the source. If you want.”

  “What’s it look like?” asked George. “The transmission?”

  “Can’t read it. But there is a pattern. Same as the original intercept.”

  “Will you be able to translate it if we get a larger sample?”

  “There’s no way to know. Maybe. You’re assuming it has a meaning.”

  “How could it not?” asked Alyx.

  “It could be a test message,” said Hutch. She sent a message to Preach, informing him what had happened. At about the same time another transmission came in from the Condor.

  “Big news. We’ve picked up the 1107 signal. It’s aimed directly at Safe Harbor.”

  He signed off, and Bill came back. “Captain, they transmitted a data package on the reception.”

  “Yes?”

  “Configuration doesn’t match. And the signal is stronger on its arrival at Point B than it should be.”

  “There are other transmitters here,” said Hutch.

  “I hardly see that it can be otherwise. The numbers suggest they are blending transmissions from three sources. Presumably all are in orbit around the neutron star.”

  IT WAS A night for losing sleep. Bill rediscovered the signal and rotated the telescopes toward the source. “Nothing visible,” he said.

  Hutch rotated the Memphis, and they moved closer to the dead star, homing on the transmission. Twenty minutes after they’d started, Preach was back. Looking shaken.

  “We’re in orbit around Safe Harbor,” he said. “And I have bad news. It looks as if we couldn’t have picked a less appropriate name. The planet is hot. This is a dead world. Radiation levels are high. Lots of craters. Ruins everywhere. Looks as if they’ve had a nuclear war down there.” His image blinked off, to be replaced by a water-filled crater. Wreckage ringed the perimeter. The land was gray and black, sterile, rocky, blasted, broken only by occasional brown patches of what might be vegetable growth.

  “It’s like this almost everywhere.” Images flashed by. Rubble, mountains of debris, great holes gouged in the earth. Dead cities. Here and there, buildings stood. Often only walls or foundations. An occasional house.

  “We haven’t seen any indication of land animals other than a few long-necked creatures—look like giraffes—and birds. Lots of birds. But that’s it. We’ll keep looking, although no one here expects to find anything. It looks as if they did a pretty thorough job of it.

  “Tom wants to send down a landing party, but we have no way to scrub the lander afterward so I’m not going to allow it. It’s causing a little friction. The mission director has insisted on firing off a request to the Academy, demanding they override me. They won’t, of course. If someone got killed, that would make the brass at home directly responsible.

  “The moonbase looks dead, too. I guess it would have to be. At the moment we have no idea what they looked like.”

  There were more pictures, and then the Preacher was back. “We were glad to hear of your success,” he said. “Whatever their transmitters are saying, though, it doesn’t look as if anybody’s listening anymore.”

  They all sat quietly, stunned. Hutch felt the thrusters fire once, briefly, adjusting their alignment. Then she opened her channel to the Condor: “Preach, do you have any sense how long ago it happened?”

  THE RESPONSE CAME in a bit more than an hour later.

  “Not in the immediate past,” Preach said. “Some of the wreckage is overgrown, but it’s hard to tell without going down and taking samples. You ask me to guess, I’d say five, maybe six, hundred years. But it’s only a guess.

  “There’s no indication that anybody survived. We’ve been looking for signs, but nothing’s moving down there, no boats, no vehicles, nothing.

  “Did I mention there are roads? Highways, actually. They might have been paved at one time. There are four continents, and some of the roads cross coast to coast. Looks like an old-fashioned interstate system. And most of the harbors were improved. They’re complete with sunken ships.”

  Images began to flash across the screen. The ships were eerily similar to the kinds of vessels that had roamed Earth’s seas until recently. Of course, she thought, that only makes sense. How many ways are there to build a ship?

  And there, unmistakably, were the remains of an airport. The tower had been blown away, the runways were overgrown with shrubs, the hangars and terminals had collapsed. But it was impossible to miss. Off to one side they could even make out the wreckage of several aircraft. Propeller-driven.

  “Here’s the moonbase,” said Preach. A half dozen dome-shaped structures stood on a plain. Near a depression that might once have been a riverbed. “We’ll be going down l
ater today, to the moon, to take a look.” His expression changed. He glanced up, and Hutch knew his attention had been drawn by something on his overhead screen. He blinked off momentarily, then came back. “Wait one. We’ve got an artificial satellite.”

  He left his seat again and disappeared. Someone, Herman, she thought, commented that they were getting more questions than answers.

  Tom Isako, the mission director on the Condor, stepped into the picture. “We’re going to sign off for a few minutes,” he said. “George, it looks as if there are several satellites out there. They’re there, but we can’t see them. They are apparently invisible.”

  George was standing with his jaw slack. It was too much for him. Alyx tapped his shoulder to remind him he should respond. “Okay,” he said. “Keep us informed.”

  The screen broke away to the Condor’s logo.

  Bill broke in: “Captain, that explains why we haven’t seen our target transmitter.”

  “Lightbenders?” asked Nick. “But what would be the point? I mean, out here, who’s going to see them anyway? Why would anyone care?”

  chapter 8

  There is nothing that overwhelms the senses quite like an unwelcome silence.

  —ALANA KASPI,

  REMINISCENCES, 2201

  “HUTCH, I’VE LOCATED the transmitter.”

  They were all in mission control. “Where?” she asked.

  Bill put 1107 on-screen, drew an orbit, and marked the position. “It appears that Dr. Isako was correct.”

  “Lightbender?”

  “Yes. Or something similar. And it masks heat generation as well.”

  “It’s still transmitting to the same target? To Point B?”

  “That seems to be the case.”

  There were more embraces and calls for more champagne. The sedate group that had quietly watched sims and played bridge during the first few weeks became almost rowdy. Hutch complied, wondering when she’d last seen people change moods so quickly. “To the Hockelmann Seven,” Nick said. And George drank “to our neighbors, and let’s hope we can find them.” Herman, especially charming because he meant it, suggested a toast “to our gorgeous captain.”