Polaris Read online

  They played some more cards. He started the latest Chug Randall thriller, in which Chug has to outwit a gang of interstellar pirates who are after a shipment of priceless works of art. He watched some talk shows. (Miguel loved watching people argue. He didn’t much care what they argued about, as long as it got loud and passionate. And nothing got louder than panels on politics and religion.)

  He was eating more than he would have on a normal flight. And skimping on his daily workout. He promised himself that he’d get back to his routine the next day.

  Then they were at the end of another evening, and he said good night to Shawn, who seemed able to entertain himself going through Sebastian’s specs. Miguel had not slept well the first night because he was worried that they would find the Polaris. Now he didn’t sleep well because he was bored and annoyed. He’d mention it to Maddy next time he saw her.

  He finally dropped off at about 0200 hours. And Sebastian woke him ten minutes later. “Miguel, I can see the Polaris.”

  It was substantially off course, moving at about forty degrees off its original heading. And angled down, out of the plane of what used to be the planetary system. It was running at a lower velocity than he’d been led to expect. He sent off a transmission to Indigo, then woke Shawn.

  The specialist looked relieved. “At least we know where they are,” he said.

  But why are they here? There was no simple explanation that didn’t involve either catastrophe or an unlikely breakdown of both comms and propulsion. There was a possibility he’d pushed to the back of his mind: They might have been punctured by debris, by rocks blown away from the dying sun. Or maybe a burst of radiation had penetrated the shielding.

  “Range, Sebastian?”

  “Six point six million kilometers.”

  “Open a channel.”

  “Channel open.”

  “Polaris, this is Peronovski. Madeleine, is everything okay?” Miguel took a deep breath and settled down to wait. Round-trip for the signal would be almost a minute, plus whatever time Maddy needed to respond.

  “Power signature is normal,” said Sebastian. An image of the Polaris appeared on the shuttle screen. It was running without lights.

  He counted off a minute. Then two.

  “Maddy, please answer up.”

  Shawn wiped the back of his hand against his mouth. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Don’t know. Madeleine, are you there?”

  Silence filled the bridge.

  “Sebastian,” he said, “can you contact the AI?”

  “Negative, Miguel. There is no response.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Shawn, let’s go have a look.”

  The Polaris was small and showy. It was silver and black, with a flared rear end and teardrop pods along its flanks and a swept-back fuselage and a wraparound bridge over the prow. None of these features was necessary, of course. The only things a starship needs are symmetry and engines. Beyond those, appearance doesn’t matter much. But the Polaris had been intended to impress VIPs, so Survey had spent money.

  They went over in the shuttle, and he inspected the hull. There was no sign of damage. And no indication of movement on the bridge. “Depressurize the cabin, Sebastian. And take us directly alongside the main airlock.”

  The AI complied. Miguel and Walker checked each other’s pressure suits, and, when the lamps turned green, left the shuttle and jumped to the Polaris.

  The outer hatch responded to the control panel and swung open. They entered the airlock, the hatch closed behind them, and the air pressure started to rise. When it reached normal, the inner door opened.

  The artificial gravity was on, but the interior was dark. Temperature was within normal range. They switched on wrist lights and removed their helmets. “Kage,” he said addressing the AI, “hello. Answer up, please. What’s going on?”

  Shawn flashed his lamp around at a table and chairs. They were in the common room. And other than the fact the lights were off, and nobody was there, everything looked normal.

  “Kage?”

  He would not have been able to give instructions to the AI, but she should respond to him.

  Shawn tried his luck and shook his head. “She’s not functioning,” he said.

  Miguel looked on the bridge. Nobody there. And no visible damage.

  “Are they dead?” asked Shawn.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Any way that could happen?”

  “Not without leaving a hole in the hull.”

  “How about a madman? Maybe somebody went berserk.”

  “Somebody running amok with an ax?” Ridiculous. Especially among this crowd. Every one of them had led an exemplary existence. He’d checked their backgrounds while they were en route. Pillars of the community. All of them. But the prospect chilled him nonetheless. Had there been a maniac, he’d still be on board.

  “We need light,” Miguel said. He crossed the bridge and sat down in the pilot’s chair. The control board looked standard. He threw a couple of switches. Lights came on. “Kage,” he said, “do you hear me?”

  The silence rolled back. Shawn knelt and opened a black box at the base of the pilot’s chair. “The circuits seem to be intact.” He touched a switch, pushed it forward. “Try it now.”

  “Kage, are you there?”

  “Hello.” A female voice. “To whom am I speaking?”

  “Captain Miguel Alvarez. Of the Peronovski. Kage, what happened here?”

  “Captain, I am sorry, but I do not understand the question.”

  “You were supposed to start back to Indigo six days ago. Instead, you’re adrift near Delta Kay. Where Delta Kay was. What happened?”

  “I don’t know, Captain.”

  “Did somebody turn you off, Kage?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  He peered into the black box. Someone could have disconnected one of the core circuits without her being aware it was happening. That would have shut her down. But if that’s what happened, they went to the trouble to reconnect, but did not throw the switch to reactivate the AI. Why would anyone do that?

  “Kage, what are your last recollections?”

  “We were getting ready to make the jump into Armstrong space. At the end of the mission.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “That’s what I remember. Next I was talking to you. I am not aware of the passage of time between those events.”

  “Kage,” he said, “where’s Madeleine?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t see her.”

  “How about the others?”

  “I don’t see anyone.”

  “Miguel,” said Shawn, “she has a restricted view of the ship. AIs always do. We’re going to have to find them ourselves.”

  They put the lights on and started aft. Through the common room. Down the main passageway, which was lined with doors, four on each side. Miguel had never before been aboard the Polaris, but he knew that these were the quarters for the captain and her passengers.

  “Madeleine?” he called. “Hello? Anybody home?” His voice echoed through the ship.

  “Spooky,” said Shawn.

  “Yes, it is. Stay close until we figure out what’s going on here.” He touched the pressure plate on the first door, the captain’s quarters, and it opened. It was empty, but Maddy’s clothes were hung up.

  The cabin across the passageway was also empty. As were the others, and each of the washrooms.

  “What’s below?” Shawn asked, his voice barely a whisper.

  “Cargo, engine room, and lander.”

  They went down and looked. There was nobody in cargo.

  “This is crazy,” said Shawn.

  Miguel led the way into the power room. Nobody lurking in the spaces between the engines. Nobody in storage. Nobody in the launch area.

  They approached the lander, which was the only place on the ship where they hadn’t looked. Alvarez opened the hatch and peered in.

  Nobody in the fro
nt seat. Nobody in the back.

  The place felt haunted. “What the hell,” he said, “is going on?”

  There was a spare washroom on the lower deck, but it was empty. Cabinets lined one bulkhead. Several of them were big enough to hide in, so he opened them one by one. They were also empty.

  They found two pressure suits. “Kage,” he said, “how many pressure suits are on board?”

  “Four, Captain.”

  “We’re looking at two of them.”

  “There are two more on the bridge.”

  “They’re there now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So all four suits are accounted for.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  And the lander lay snugly within its restraints. “They have to be here somewhere.”

  There were clothes in seven of the eight compartments. That figured, since there had been a captain and six passengers. Shoes were laid out in two of the rooms, personal gear in drawers everywhere. Readers, toothbrushes, combs, bracelets. In one, a copy of Lost Souls had fallen onto the deck.

  “What could have happened?” asked Shawn.

  “Kage, is there any place in the entire system currently habitable?”

  “Negative, Captain. Not now.”

  He’d forgotten. The sun had gone out. That seemed a trivial point at the moment. “There was a living world here, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes. Delta Karpis III.”

  “Would it have supported humans?”

  “Yes. If they were careful.”

  “No point to this,” said Shawn. “They had no way to get off the ship.”

  They turned out the lights and set the Polaris for power-save mode. Then they went back out through the airlock, left the outer hatch open, and boarded the shuttle.

  He was glad to get back to the Peronovski. He hadn’t realized how chilled he’d been until the warm air hit him. Then he activated the hypercomm.

  “What are you going to tell them?” asked Shawn.

  “I’m still thinking about it,” he said. He sat down and opened the channel, but before he said anything for the record, he directed the AI to move well away from the Polaris. “Give us some space,” he said.

  ONe

  Say what you will, murder is at least a straightforward crime, honest and direct. There are other acts far worse, more cowardly, more cruel.

  —Edward Trout, during the penalty phase of the trial of Thomas Witcover

  SIXTY YEARS LATER.

  1428TH YEAR SINCE THE WORLD FOUNDATION OF ASSOCIATED STATES (RIMWAY).

  I would probably never have gotten involved with the Polaris business had my boss, Alex Benedict, not figured out where the Shenji outstation was.

  Alex was a dealer in antiquities, although he could be infuriating because his passion for artifacts inevitably took second place to his interest in profits. He was in it for the money. His job consisted largely of schmoozing with clients and suppliers, and he liked that, too. Furthermore, his career choice brought him more prestige than he could ever have earned as an investment banker or some such thing.

  The truth is that I did most of the work at Rainbow. That was his corporation. He was the CEO, and I was the workforce. But I shouldn’t complain. The job was intriguing, and he paid me well.

  My name’s Chase Kolpath, and I was with him during the Corsarius affair, twelve years earlier. Which, as you might know, led to some rewriting of history. And a small fortune for Alex. But that’s another story.

  In his chosen profession, he was a genius. He knew what collectors liked, and he knew where to find it. Rainbow was primarily a wheel-and-deal operation. We located, say, the pen with which Amoroso the Magnificent had signed the Charter, talked its owner into selling it to our client, and took a generous commission. Occasionally, when the prices looked especially appealing, we bought the objects and turned them over at prices more commensurate with their value. During all the years I worked with him, Alex seemed invariably to be correct in his judgments. We almost never lost money.

  How he managed that without giving a damn about the objects themselves, I’ve never understood. He kept a few around the country house that served as his private residence and corporate headquarters. There was a drinking cup from the Imperial Palace at Millennium, and a tie clasp that had once belonged to Mirandi Cavello. That one goes back two thousand years. But he didn’t really connect with them, if you know what I mean. They were there for show.

  Anyhow, Alex had located a previously unknown Shenji outstation. In case you don’t stay up with these things and have no idea what an outstation is, corporations used them as bases when travel around the Confederacy took weeks, and sometimes months. I know I’m dating myself when I admit that I was a pilot in the days before the quantum drive, and I remember what it was like. You left Rimway and headed out and it took a full day to go twenty light-years. If you were doing some serious traveling, you got plenty of time to improve your chess game.

  Outstations were placed in orbit at various strategic points so that travelers could stop and get refreshed, pick up spare parts, refuel, replenish stores, or just get out of the ship for a while. Some were run by governments, most were corporate. Unless you’ve been on an old-style flight, you have no idea what sitting inside one of those burners for weeks at a crack can be like. It’s all strictly eyeblink now. Turn it on, and you can be halfway across the Arm before you finish your coffee. No limit other than the one imposed by fuel. Alex gets credit for that, too. I mean, he was the one who found the original quantum drive. And I won’t be giving away any secrets if I tell you that it hasn’t made him happy that he was never able to cash in. It seems you can’t patent historical inventions that somebody else, uh, invented. Even if no living person knew about it anymore. The government gave him a medal and a modest cash prize and thanked him very much.

  If you’ve read Alex’s memoir, A Talent for War, you know the story.

  The outstation was orbiting a blue giant whose catalog number I’ve forgotten. Doesn’t matter anyhow. It was close to six thousand light-years from Rimway, on the edge of Confederacy space. If the sources were accurate, it was eighteen hundred years old.

  Outstations are almost always reconfigured asteroids. The Shenji models tended to be big. This one had a diameter of 2.6 kilometers, and I’m talking about the station, not the asteroid. It was in a seventeen-year orbit around its sun. Like most of these places that have been abandoned a while, it had developed a distinct tumble, which, of course, tends to shake up whatever might be stored inside.

  It was the first time in its history Rainbow Enterprises had discovered one of these things. “Are we going to register it?” I asked. We would do that to claim ownership.

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?” It would have been just a matter of informing the Registry of Archeological Sites. You gave them a brief description of the find, and its location, and it was legally yours.

  He was looking out at the station. It was dark and battered, and you could easily have missed seeing what it was. In its glory days it would have said hello and invited you over for some meals and a short vacation. “Off-world law enforcement doesn’t exist,” he said. “All we’d be doing is giving away the location of the site.”

  “Maybe that’s what we should do, Alex.”

  “What is?”

  “Give it away. Contribute it to Survey. Let them worry about it.”

  He stuck his tongue into the side of his jaw. “That might not be a bad idea, Chase,” he said. We both knew we could carry off pretty much everything of value, short of the site itself. Giving it to Survey would generate goodwill with an organization that had always supplied well-heeled clients. And Rainbow Enterprises would get plenty of free publicity. “Exactly what I was thinking, my little urchin.”

  Most of its space had been given over to docking and maintenance. But there had also been a couple of dining areas, living accommodations, and recreational facilities. We found the remains of open spaces
that had once been parks. There’d been a lake. And even a beachfront.

  It was all gray and cold now. Eighteen centuries is a long time, even in near vacuum.

  There was no power, of course, hence no gravity. And no light. But that was okay. We had made a serious strike, and Alex, usually staid, complacent, one might even say dull, became a child in a toy store as we toured the place, dragging spare air tanks with us.

  But the toys turned out to be pretty well smashed. Personal items left behind by the inhabitants were afloat everywhere, going round and round with the station. Chairs and tables, stiffened fabrics, knives and forks, notebooks and shoes, lamps and cushions. And a lot of stuff that was beyond recognition, bits and pieces of everything, whatever might have broken off over the years. The place was turning on its axis every seven and a half minutes, an action that sent clouds of loose objects bumping around the bulkheads. “The thing’s a giant blender,” said Alex, trying to swallow his disappointment.

  Shenji culture is best remembered today for its flared towers (which look like rockets waiting to roar into the sky), their asymmetric architectural designs, their affinity for showy tombs, the dramas of Andru Barkat (which are still periodically revived on some of the snobbier stages around town), and their descent into the series of religious wars that eventually destroyed them. And maybe their drive to find nonhuman civilizations, which went on almost without pause, and without noticeable result, for two millennia. The Shenji were not people who gave up easily. But during their golden age, before the prophet Jayla-Sun showed up, they were convinced there were others out there and that the human race wouldn’t fulfill its destiny until it could sit down with them and talk philosophy. Even that effort was largely a religious thing, but if it cost a lot of resources, it caused no damage. The common wisdom now is that there is nobody else anywhere in the Milky Way, except us, and the Ashiyyur. The Mutes. (All this with the Shenji, of course, happened before Gonzalez discovered the Mutes. Or, if you want to be factual, before they discovered him.) And I don’t mind telling you that it wouldn’t be a bad thing if they would pack up and move on. Andromeda would be a good place for them.