Chindi Page 13

  Hutch bowed appreciatively. Then she directed Bill to trace the orbit and the signal direction to Point B.

  The lights winked off, and a marker signifying the neutron star appeared at one end of the room. The transmitter, depicted as a tiny antenna, began moving around it in a tight orbit. Across the room, a yellow star blinked on. “Point B,” said Bill.

  The antenna brightened. It sprouted a line that moved deliberately through the chamber and connected with the star. “The plane of the orbit,” said Bill, “is directly perpendicular to the transmission line.”

  “Is that significant?” asked George.

  “Sure. The satellites always have a clear view of the target. Bill, how many transmitters do we expect to find?”

  “Three,” he said. “Placed equidistantly in the same orbit.”

  George wanted an explanation of that too.

  “The transmission has to go a long way,” she said. “Sixteen light-years. There’d be a lot of degradation over that kind of distance. A single satellite’s not enough. We already know the incoming signal at Point B is considerably stronger than they’d get from a single unit.

  “All three transmit. If you phase the signals properly, you get incredible resolution with fairly low power. You’d have a dish antenna with an effective diameter equal to that of the orbit. What we’ve picked up, what the Academy’s satellites picked up, is only a side lobe. A piece of the signal.”

  THEY USED TWO days getting into position to intercept a second transmission, which was found precisely where Bill had predicted. They’d been expecting it, so everyone was up and dressed. But they still couldn’t get a visual on the transmitter itself. “Send the results to the Condor, Bill,” Hutch said. “The question for us,” she told George and his team, “is whether we want to go pick up one of the transmitters. It takes us in a bit close to the monster, actually closer than I’d prefer. But we can do it.”

  She had everyone’s attention. Alyx put their concern into words. “Why closer than you’d prefer? Is there a danger?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s just that, in close, it becomes a pretty steep gravity well. We’ll use up a lot of fuel climbing back out.”

  “How long would it take?” asked Herman.

  Hutch passed the question to Bill. “The entire operation,” he replied, “would require several weeks.”

  “Do you think we can take one on board?” asked George.

  “Depends how big it is.”

  “I say we do it,” said Nick. “And if we have to, we take the thing apart. I mean, it would be nice to go home with a transmitter built somewhere else. You guys have any idea the kind of value that would have?”

  They did, and the decision was taken.

  Minutes later the engines changed tone, and the Memphis slipped onto a new heading.

  “Why the lightbender technology?” asked Nick. “In a lonely place, why go to the trouble?”

  Tor made a face that suggested it was a problem that had been bothering him too. “Maybe it’s standardized equipment,” he said. “Maybe it’s the basic model.”

  Herman stood up and leaned against a bulkhead. “Why leave anything here at all?” he asked. “I mean, why would anybody even be interested in this thing?”

  “Why were we interested?” asked Pete. “It’s a neutron star. It has some fascinating characteristics.”

  “But there are a lot of neutron stars. Why this one?”

  “You have to pick one,” said Pete. “Maybe this happens to be it.”

  “Or…?” asked George, inviting him to continue.

  “It does have a unique quality.” He turned toward Hutch. “Could we get a look off to the port side, please?”

  Hutch arranged the picture until he had what he wanted.

  “See the red star?” It was dim and quite ordinary. “I don’t recall its catalog number, but it’s a red giant, fourteen known planets. Eleven-oh-seven is headed in its direction. Eventually, it’s going to scramble the system.”

  “When’s that going to happen?” asked Hutch.

  “Seventeen thousand years.” Pete said it with a straight face. “Give or take.”

  “Well,” said Herman, “that’s going to be a long wait for somebody, isn’t it?”

  Bill announced another transmission from the Condor and put it up. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Preach, looking out at them with a puzzled smile, “we’ve found a satellite. We are pulling alongside it as I speak, and will begin taking it on board within the next few minutes. I’ll keep you informed.” A picture of the object replaced the Preacher. It was floating just outside the Condor’s cargo bay doors. It was diamond-shaped, with two dish antennas perhaps four times the size of the core unit. The surface of both the core and the dishes was cut in myriad odd angles. And it had a set of thrusters. Everything was protected by a mirrorlike coating that made the object quite hard to see. “You’ll notice,” he said, “it’s stealth rather than lightbender technology. Plus smart camouflage. The surface is completely covered with sensors and display units. They’re set up so that light falling on a sensor on one side is reproduced in a display directly opposite. We don’t figure the resolution would be very good, but up here, who’s going to notice? The point is that, unless you’re right on top of it, you won’t see it.”

  Hutch had never seen anything like it before.

  “We experimented with some of this stuff back in the twenty-first century,” Preach said. “The photodetectors are only a centimeter or so in diameter, and the light emitters are maybe ten times that size.”

  Hutch asked about the energy source. They had snacks while they waited for the answer to come back.

  “We haven’t been able to figure that out, Hutch,” Preacher replied. “It doesn’t seem to have one. But then, we don’t have experts on this kind of thing.”

  THEY WATCHED WHILE Preach went out with a go-pack, removed the dishes, and brought them inside. That done, the satellite would fit through the cargo doors. The Condor’s AI fine-tuned the ship’s alignment, turned off the artificial gravity, then fired the thrusters. Hutch and the Memphis team watched the satellite drift slowly into the cargo bay.

  Now they were getting close-up pictures. Preacher stayed out of the way as the contact team began removing the mirror coating, then started laying bare the black boxes and turning shafts and fittings of the unit. There were several lines of unfamiliar symbols along the stem.

  Hutch could see that her passengers were still torn, delighted that a breakthrough had finally occurred, dejected that they had gotten on the wrong flight.

  The team members took turns holding up parts for the imager. Harry Brubaker, using the comic deadpan that had made him famous, showed them a connecting cable; Tom Isako had a black box that did heaven knew what; J. J. Parker, a board member on several major retail corporations, showed them a long silver rod.

  The bishop had a pair of sensors, and Janey Hoskin, the cosmetic queen, produced a basketball-sized sphere that housed three scopes. She was laughing and wearing a party hat. A tall, grinning male whose name Hutch did not know was waiting his turn when the screen went dark.

  There was an impatient rustling behind Hutch.

  “Interrupted at the source,” said Bill.

  “Would happen now,” said Alyx.

  George laughed. “They’re drinking too much. Somebody probably walked into the—”

  It came back on, momentarily. But it was a scene of panic, people stumbling about, lights flickering, someone screaming.

  The Memphis people murmured, grew still. Grew frightened.

  Then it was gone again.

  “Hutch?” Pete’s voice, thick with emotion. “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t know.”

  The screen stayed dark.

  “No signal,” said Bill.

  “Plot a course,” she said.

  chapter 9

  There are not ten people in the world whose deaths would spoil my dinner, but there are one or two wh
ose deaths would break my heart.

  —THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY,

  LETTER TO HANNAH M. MACAULAY,

  JULY 31, 1833

  MASS DETECTORS WEREN’T entirely reliable, and while they might warn a ship that it was about to materialize inside, say, a planet, there was no guarantee. The jump back to sublight always included a degree of breathlessness.

  Consequently, superluminals were more likely, and indeed were required by law, to materialize in deep space. Earthbound ships made their jumps out beyond Mars’s orbit, and then spent the better part of several days coasting in.

  Hutch could afford no such luxury if she were to arrive in the Condor’s vicinity in a timely manner. She drew a circle with a half-million-kilometer radius around the double planet and directed Bill to aim for the arc.

  The odds against catastrophe were so heavily in her favor that she didn’t tell her passengers what she was doing. She used the neutron star to gain acceleration more quickly than she would otherwise have been able to do, and the Memphis therefore made the jump into hyperspace less than forty minutes after Preach’s call for help.

  Throughout all this the Condor remained silent.

  When she had sent off a message to Outpost, and assured herself no one was closer than the Memphis, she retired to her quarters. They were by then into the early-morning hours. She climbed out of her jumpsuit, got into bed, and killed the lights. But she lay awake staring into the dark, seeing Preach’s face.

  Accidents were rare among the superluminals. There’d been a couple of instances of runaway engines and malfunctioning AI’s. That was thought to be the cause of the loss of the Venture, which had vanished into the sack, into hyperspace, at the dawn of the interstellar age. The Hanover had been wrecked when its warning systems had inexplicably failed to notice a rock in its path. There’d been a couple of others. But if one calculated the number of flights and distances traveled against mishaps, the possibility became vanishingly small.

  Whatever the Condor’s problem, they had the lander available. It would be a bit crowded, but the lander would sustain them all for the couple of days she’d need to get to the scene.

  They traveled through the night and into the morning. At 0600, the interior lights brightened, indicating the arrival of the new day. Everyone came down early for breakfast, each inquiring on entry if anything had been heard during the night. Had Hutch ever seen anything like this before?

  She hadn’t. It was her experience that ships never vanished, and only lost their communications when the equipment broke down, or when they ran into a storm of radiation.

  “The satellite was booby-trapped,” Nick suggested.

  Apparently everyone had been thinking the same thing. The possibility had occurred to Hutch, of course, but she could see no sense in it. What would be the point?

  “Sheer malevolence,” suggested George. “We tend to assume that anybody we meet out here is going to be reasonable. That might be a misguided notion.”

  It had always been Hutch’s view that reason would be required to build a star-drive. No barbarians off-world. Savages need not apply. Maybe she was wrong.

  Still, the evidence so far supported that view. The long-gone Monument-Makers had tried to shield at least two primitive cultures from the worst effects of the omega clouds. And a race of hawks had done what they could, a couple of thousand years ago, to assist the undeveloped civilization on Maleiva III from a cloud-induced ice age.

  They’d finished eating and were sitting around, worried, frightened, beginning to wish they’d not embarked on the mission, when Bill announced that a message had come in from Outpost.

  It was Jerry Hooper, who’d been with operations out there as far back as Hutch could remember. He was exceedingly serious, never smiled, looked as if he’d never had a good time. But he was competent. “Hutch,” he said, “we’ve also lost contact with the Condor. They missed their scheduled movement report. We’re putting together a rescue unit. Meantime we are forwarding their approximate last position to Bill. Academy has been informed. Please stay in contact and use caution until we determine what happened.”

  “They didn’t hear anything either?” asked Alyx.

  “Apparently nothing more than we did.”

  “Wouldn’t the AI send out a distress call?”

  “If it could,” said Hutch.

  She tried to reassure them. Whatever the problem was, their friends were with the best captain in the business. They couldn’t be in better hands. In fact, they’d all heard of Brawley. Even Alyx, who said she’d been thinking about adapting several of his exploits for a show.

  Hutch watched the corners of her eyes crinkle, and saw that she’d thought of something else that disturbed her. “If they were in the lander,” she asked, “wouldn’t they let us know?”

  “The lander doesn’t have hypercomm capability. Landers don’t generate that kind of power.”

  For the moment, at least, they all looked a bit relieved.

  THEY STAYED TOGETHER in mission control, and the silence from the Condor became the elephant in the room that no one wanted to talk about. “Maybe they’re still there,” Herman said finally.

  “Who’s still there?”

  “Whoever built the moonbase. Whoever put up the satellites. Maybe they got jumped by the locals.”

  “Do we have weapons?” asked Alyx. “Just in case.”

  “No,” said Hutch.

  “Nothing to fight with if we’re attacked?” asked Nick. He looked incredulous.

  George cleared his throat. “Never occurred to me that we might need weapons. I don’t think anybody else ever put weapons onto a starship.” He looked at Hutch for vindication.

  “There’s never been anybody to fight with out here,” she said.

  Herman was sipping from a glass of wine. He finished it, put the glass down, looked at her. “Maybe until now,” he said.

  No one was hungry, so they passed on dinner. At George’s request Hutch put the outside view on the main panel. It was a reluctant accession because the sack was filled with floating mist. The ships themselves seemed barely to move, and the murkiness was inevitably ominous, gloomy, sinister. But she complied, and they took to watching the haze part before them as though they were a sailing vessel doing ten knots. Their mood grew more fatalistic through the evening. By eleven, when most of the passengers usually started peeling off and heading for bed, they were convinced all hope had fled.

  Only Nick maintained an upbeat mood. “They’ll be okay,” he said. “I’ve read about this guy Brawley.”

  Just before midnight Bill informed them the ship was approaching jump. Hutch told them to strap down and went up to the bridge. Tor came in behind her, but hesitated in the doorway. “I thought you’d like some company.” She smiled and waved him to the copilot’s seat.

  Bill started a six-minute countdown.

  “Crunch time,” she said.

  Six green lights lined up on the console. Five passengers and the copilot were buckled in.

  “What do you think?” he asked, quietly, as if she were finally free to speak her mind.

  “If they got to the lander,” she said, “they’ll be okay.”

  Pete’s voice came over the commlink, “Please, God…”

  All gauges on the jump-status indicator went to a bright amber.

  “Three minutes,” said Bill.

  Hutch diverted additional power from the fusion plant. Systems lamps turned green. The power levels of the Hazeltines began to rise. The mass indicator showed zero.

  “I’m not optimistic,” said Tor.

  She got a red light. Something rolling around loose in mission control.

  “It’s my notebook,” George said over the commlink.

  “Can you secure it?”

  “Doing it now.”

  “One minute.”

  They floated forward.

  The red light went out. The console indicated all harnesses in place again.

  Lamps dimmed.r />
  The sublight navigational systems, which had been in a power-saving mode, came alive. The fusion plant went to ready status. External sensors came on-line. Shields powered up.

  Someone in back said, “Good luck.”

  And they slid smoothly out into the dark. Stars blinked on, and a shrunken sun showed up off to port. Beside her, Tor took a deep breath.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “A little dizzy.”

  “Happens all the time. Close your eyes and wait for things to settle.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t make any sudden moves.” She was already scanning the console for radio signals. If Preach and his people were in the lander, they’d be broadcasting.

  “Hear anything?” asked Tor.

  “No.” Her spirits sagged. “Not a peep.” The Hazeltines cut off. “Okay, folks,” she said. “You can get up. Things should be quiet for the moment.” She poured coffee for herself and got a cup for Tor. “Bill,” she said, “where are we?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Are you reading anything?”

  “Negative. Sensors are clear.”

  Not good. She stared at her coffee and put it down untasted.

  Navigation inside a new system was always a speculative prospect coming out of a jump. At a sixteen-light-year range, variance between intended destination and actual arrival point could run as much as 2 A.U.s. Added to that was the difficulty of spotting planets, which were usually the only bodies, other than the sun, close enough to help in establishing one’s position. For the moment, they were lost.

  “I’ve got one of the gas giants,” Bill said. “Matching it with data from Outpost.”

  Hurry, Bill.

  “Hutch, the range from the sun is about right. We’re close to Safe Harbor’s orbit.”

  “Good!” Tor raised his fists.

  “Don’t get too excited,” Hutch said. “It could be on the other side of the sun.”

  “You don’t really think that?”

  “It’s possible.”

  Questions began coming in from her passengers. Had they sighted the Condor yet? Why wasn’t something happening?