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  He was in his office. “Hutch,” he said, “I’m sorry about the problem. The Wildside was the biggest ship we had available. They’ve been sitting out there for years. Surely they’ll be all right for a few more weeks. I understand the Lochran is ahead of schedule. We’ve got a couple people here who’ve spent time at Renaissance, and they tell me the place always looks scary to people going out there for the first time. It’s because you’re running through all those gases. Can’t see very far.

  “What I’d like you to do is just try to play things by ear when you get to Renaissance. Don’t mention that the Wildside is under capacity. They won’t know if you don’t bring it up. I’d send a second ship, but that seems a bit like overkill. Just tough it out.

  “I’ll check on the Lochran situation, alert them that we’re uncomfortable with the present arrangement. Maybe I can hurry them along.” He ran a hand through his thinning hair and looked squarely out of the screen at her. “Meantime I need you to just get us through. Okay? I know you can handle it.”

  Serenity Station’s ring of stars replaced the solemn features.

  “That’s it?” she said. “That’s all he’s got to say?”

  “His attitude might be different if he were here looking out the window.”

  “You goddam know it would be.”

  He paused and frowned, distracted by something. “More incoming,” he said. “From Renaissance.”

  Hutch felt her stomach lurch.

  This time it was the station director himself. Lawrence Dimenna, A.F.D., G.B.Y., two-time winner of the Brantstatler Award. He was handsome in an austere and distant sort of way. Like many accomplished centenarians, he looked relatively young, yet his eyes radiated the inflexibility and certainty that comes with age. She detected no amiability in the man. His hair was blond, his jaw set, and he was not happy. Nevertheless he managed a smile. “Captain Hutchins, I’m glad you got here promptly.”

  He was seated at a desk. Several plaques were arranged on the bulkhead behind him, positioned to reveal they were there. She wasn’t close enough to make out details unless she increased magnification, an action that would have been perceived as less than polite. But one carried the United Kingdom coat of arms. Knight of the Realm, perhaps?

  He gathered himself, studied the broad expanse of his desk, then brought his eyes up to look into hers. He looked frightened. “We’ve had an eruption,” he said. He used the sort of monotone that suggests the speaker is keeping his head amid serious trouble. “Proteus has thrown off a major flare.”

  Her heart picked up.

  “I told them this could happen. There should have been a ship on-station and ready to go.”

  My God. Was he saying what she thought he was saying?

  “I’ve given the order to evacuate. When you get here tomorrow, we’ll have a couple of technicians standing by to refuel you—.” He paused. “I assume that’ll be necessary.”

  “Certainly advisable,” she said, speaking out of a haze. “If we have time.”

  “Okay, we’ll take care of it. I don’t suppose you can do anything to speed things up?”

  “You mean get there more quickly? No. We’re locked into our present flight plan.”

  “I understand. Well, it’s all right. We don’t expect the flare to arrive until about 0930.”

  She let a few seconds pass. “Are we talking total loss of the station?”

  The return transmission took several minutes. “Yes,” he said, stumbling a bit. He was having trouble maintaining his composure. “We see little possibility that Renaissance can survive. Well, let me be honest. This time tomorrow, the station will have been blown away.” His head sank forward, and he seemed to be looking up at her. “Thank God you’re here, Captain. At least we’ll get our people out. If you arrive on schedule, we think we can have your ship fueled and be on our way three hours before it arrives. Should be plenty of time.

  “We’ll have everyone ready to go. If you need anything else, let the ops officer know, or myself, and we’ll see that you get it.” He got up, and the imager followed him as he came around the desk. “Thanks, Captain. I don’t know what we’d have done if you hadn’t gotten here when you did.”

  The reply lamp flashed. He was finished. Did she have anything to say?

  The engines were silent, and the only sound in the ship was the electronic burble of the instruments on the bridge and the steady hum of the air ducts. She wanted to tell him, to blurt out the truth, let him know there wasn’t room for everybody. Get it over with.

  But she didn’t. She needed time to think. “Thank you, Professor,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Then he was gone and she was left staring desolately at the blank screen.

  “What are you going to do, Hutch?” Bill asked.

  She had to struggle to keep the rage out of her voice. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Possibly we should start by notifying Barber. Hutch, this isn’t your fault. Nobody can blame you.”

  “Maybe you haven’t noticed, Bill, but I’m the front woman out here. I’m the person who gets to tell Dimenna that the flare’s a bigger problem than he realizes.” God, when I get back I’m going to throttle Barber. “We need help. Who else is in the neighborhood?”

  “The Kobi is headed to Serenity for refitting.” The Kobi was a contact vessel, funded by the Alien Research Council. It was out looking for somebody to talk to. In more than forty years, it had found nobody. But it did perform a service, training ship captains and other interested persons in how to behave if they actually happened to stumble across aliens. Hutch had been through the course: Make no threatening moves. Blink lights “in an inviting manner.” Record everything. Transmit alert to nearest station. Don’t give away strategic information, like the location of the home world. If fired on, depart hastily. The Kobi’s skipper was Chappel Reese, finicky, nervous, easily startled. The last person in the world you’d want out saying hello to the civilization down the road. But he was a fanatic on the subject, and he had relatives in high places.

  “What’s the Kobi’s capacity?”

  “It’s a yacht. Maximum is eight. Ten in an emergency.” Bill shook his head. “He’s got a full load on this flight.”

  “Who else?”

  “The Condor is not far.”

  Preacher Brawley’s ship. That brought a surge of hope. “Where is he?”

  Brawley was already a near-legendary figure. He’d saved a science mission that had miscalculated its orbit and was getting sucked down into a neutron star, he’d brought back the disease-ridden survivors of the Antares II effort without regard to his own safety, and he’d rescued a crew member on Beta Pac by using a wrench to club one of that world’s voracious reptiles to death.

  Bill looked pleased. “Within range. If he’s on schedule, the Condor could be here tonight. If he makes a good jump, he could be in by early morning.”

  “He has room?”

  “Only a handful of passengers. Plenty of space. But we should contact him without delay. There is no one else close enough to help.”

  Star travel was as much art as science. Ships did not return to sublight space with precision. One could materialize quite far from a projected destination, and the degree of uncertainty tended to increase with the range of the jump. The risk normally lay in the possibility of materializing inside a target body. In this case, even materializing inside the cloud constituted a major hazard. Thin as it was, it nevertheless possessed enough density to explode an arriving ship. That meant Preach would have to follow her own procedure, make his jump well outside the envelope, then make a run for the station. On the way back out, he’d be racing the flare until he got enough acceleration to jump back into hyperspace.

  He had reckless red hair and blue eyes that seemed lit from within. He was not extraordinarily handsome, in the classic sense, but there was an easygoing sails-to-the-wind attitude about the man and a willingness to laugh at himself that utterly charmed her. A ye
ar or so earlier, when they’d found themselves together at Serenity, he’d made her feel that she was the center of the world. Hutch wasn’t inclined to give herself to men on short acquaintance, but she’d have been willing to make an exception for Brawley. Somehow, though, the evening had gotten diverted, and she’d thought better of casting a lure. Next time, she’d decided.

  There had been no next time.

  Bill was still talking about the Condor. The ship was engaged in biological research. Brawley has been collecting samples on Goldwood, and was returning them to Bioscan’s central laboratory at Serenity. Goldwood was one of the worlds on which life had not progressed past the single-cell stage.

  “Let’s talk to them,” she said.

  Lamps blinked on. “Channel is open, Hutch. If the Condor is running on schedule, transmission time one way is one hour seventeen minutes. I will also relay through Serenity in the event he’s off-course.” Because if he was, the directed hypercomm signal would not find him.

  Despite the seriousness of her situation, Hutch felt flustered. Schoolgirl flustered. Dumb. Mentally she hitched up her socks, steadied her voice, and peered at the round black lens of the imager. “Preach,” she said, “I’ve got—”

  The lights blinked again and went out. This time they did not come back. When Bill tried to talk to her his voice sounded like a recording at reduced power. The pictures dropped off the displays, and the fan shut down, stuttered, and started up again.

  Bill tried unsuccessfully to deliver an epithet.

  The emergency lights came on.

  “What was that?” she asked. “What happened?”

  He needed about a minute to gather his voice, made several false starts, and tried again. “It was an EMP,” he said. An electromagnetic pulse.

  “How much damage?”

  “It fused everything on the hull.”

  Sensors. Transmitters and dishes. Hypercomm. Optics.

  “Are you sure? Bill, we need to contact the Condor. Tell them what’s happening.”

  “It’s all down, Hutch.”

  She gazed out at the streaming mist.

  “Don’t even think about it,” said Bill.

  “What alternative do we have?”

  “You’ll get cooked.” Radiation levels were, um, astronomical.

  Unless she went outside and replaced the transmitter, there was no hope of alerting Preach.

  “Too much wind out there at this velocity, even if you want to get yourself well-done, Hutch. Keep in mind, something happens to you, nobody gets rescued.”

  “You could manage it.”

  “At the moment, I’m blind. I couldn’t even find the station. Renaissance will notify Serenity what’s happening and Barber can figure the rest out for himself.”

  “They’ll be down, too. The same EMP—”

  “They’re equipped for this environment. They’ve got heavy-duty suits. They can send somebody out without killing him.”

  “Yeah.” She wasn’t thinking clearly. Good. She didn’t want to go anyway.

  “After we get to the station you can make all the repairs you want. If you still have a mind.”

  “It’ll be too late by then to round up Preach.”

  Bill’s fireplace went silent. “I know.”

  THEY WERE NAVIGATING on dead reckoning. Course and speed had been laid in hours ago, predicated on exact knowledge. All that was required was to avoid gliding past the station without seeing it. But visibility was getting worse, and would probably be down to a couple of klicks by morning, when they arrived. It should be enough, but God help them if they missed the target.

  “Bill, what happens if we put them all in the Wildside?”

  “Everybody? Fifty-six people? Fifty-seven counting you. How many adults? How many children? How old are they?”

  “Say forty adults. What happens?”

  His image appeared to have grown older. “We’d be okay for the first few hours. Then it’d start to get a little close. We’d be aware of a growing sense of stale air. After about thirteen hours, conditions would begin to deteriorate seriously.”

  “How long before people started sustaining damage?”

  “I don’t have enough information.”

  “Guess.”

  “I don’t like to guess. Not on something like this.”

  “Do it anyway.”

  “At about fifteen hours. Once it begins, things will go downhill quickly.” His eyes found hers. “You can do it, pick up the extra people, if Dimenna was smart enough to let Serenity know what’s happening here, and if Serenity contacted the Condor, and if the Condor could find us soon enough to take the extra people off.”

  THE LIGHTS CAME back, along with full power.

  During the course of the evening she wandered restlessly through the ship, read, watched sims, and carried on a long, rambling conversation with Bill. The AI pointed out that she’d eaten nothing since lunch. But she had no appetite.

  Later that evening, he appeared on the bridge in a VR mode, seated on her right hand. He was wearing an elaborate purple jumpsuit with green trim. A Wildside patch adorned his breast pocket. Bill prided himself on the range and ingenuity implicit in the design of his uniforms. The patches always bore his name but otherwise changed with each appearance. This one carried a silhouette of the ship crossing a galactic swirl. “Are you going to try to take everybody?”

  She’d been putting off the decision. Wait till she got to Renaissance. Then explain it to Dimenna.

  Not enough air for everybody, Professor.

  Not my fault. I didn’t know.

  She sat entertaining murderous thoughts about Barber. Bill suggested she take a trank, but she had to be sure she was fully functional in the morning. “I don’t know yet, Bill,” she said.

  The interior lights dimmed as it grew late. The observation panels also darkened, creating the illusion that night had arrived outside. Gradually the mist faded until she could see only an occasional reflection of the cabin lights outside.

  Usually she was quite comfortable in the Wildside, but tonight the vessel felt empty, gloomy, silent. There were echoes in the ship, and she listened to air currents and the murmur of the electronics. She sat down in front of her display every few minutes and checked the Wildside’s position.

  Meantime, Preacher was getting farther away.

  She could send a hypercomm after him as soon as she reached Renaissance. But by then it would be far too late.

  She decided she would leave nobody. Put them all on board, and run for it. But the Wildside didn’t have the raw power to climb directly out of the gravity well. She’d have to arc into orbit and then lift out. That would put the flare virtually on top of her before she could make the jump. But it was okay. That wasn’t the problem. The air was the problem.

  Her only hope to save everyone was to rendezvous with the Condor. She couldn’t do it in deep space; they’d have nothing to key on, so they wouldn’t be able to find each other. Not in so short a time. She had to pick a nearby star, something within a few hours, inform Preach, go there, and hope for the best. The obvious candidate was an unnamed class-M, five light-years away. Approximately eight hours’ travel time. Add that to the couple of hours it would take her to get away from the flare, and she would have people succumbing to oxygen deprivation at about the time she arrived. Even assuming the Condor showed up promptly, it was unlikely Preach would be able to find her inside another three or four hours. It was possible. He could even jump out alongside her. But it wasn’t very likely.

  “It’s not your fault,” Bill said again.

  “Bill,” she snapped, “go away.”

  He retired and left her to the clicks, burps, and whispers of the empty ship.

  SHE STAYED ON the bridge past midnight. The engines rumbled into life at about one and began the long process of slowing the Wildside down for its rendezvous.

  She looked through the archives and found an old UNN program during which Dimenna and Mary Harper and someone e
lse she didn’t know, Marvin Child, argued for the life of Renaissance Station before an Academy committee. “Do you think,” demanded Harper, “we’d ask our colleagues to go out there, that we’d go out there ourselves, if we weren’t sure it was safe?” Child was thin, gray, tired. But he exhibited a fair degree of contempt for anyone who disagreed with him. Just listen to me, he suggested, and everything will be okay. Dimenna wasn’t much better. “Of course there’s a hazard,” he conceded at the conclusion of the hearing. “But we’re willing to accept the risk.”

  What had he said to her? I told them this would happen. She listened to him and his partners assuring the world very emphatically that it would not. Hell, they’d brought their dependents out here.

  When the chairman thanked them for coming, Child nodded slightly, the way one does when the last person in the pot folds his cards. He knew they had won. Too much money had already been spent on Renaissance, and some high-powered reputations were involved.

  Right, they were willing to accept the risk. And now that the crunch had arrived, they were looking for old Hutch to come in and pick up their chips. Come on, babe. Get your rear end over here. Let’s move.

  A little before five she climbed out of her chair, trudged back to her quarters, showered, brushed her teeth, and put on a fresh uniform.

  SHE CHECKED THE individual compartments to ensure they were ready. She’d need additional bedding to protect her extra passengers. That would come from the station. She directed Bill to be ready to adjust life support to maximum.

  When that was done she went back to the bridge. Her failure to tell Dimenna the truth about their situation hung over her and somehow, in her own mind, laid the guilt for the calamity at her door. She knew that was crazy, but she couldn’t push it away.

  “We are where we are supposed to be,” said Bill, interrupting her struggle. “Twenty-seven minutes to rendezvous.” He was wearing a gray blazer and matching slacks. “It would have been prudent to shut the place down a couple of years ago.”