“I know myself now,” she said frostily.
“I have known a hundred like you. The hunger sleeps but it never dies,” Wenyuan answered confidently. “You’ll come, in time.”
On the twenty-sixth day, the sleeping were awakened and the awake alarmed by a change aboard ship that all perceived but were hard pressed to define. Only Charan, seated on the bridge, knew at once what it meant: that
Pride of Earth
had at last climbed to the coasting velocity of seventy-five percent of the speed of light. He saw it both on the status board for the AVLO drive, now lit red and yellow where it had been green, and in the pattern of stars displayed on the window, no longer distorted by the gravitational lens of the pushmi-pullyu.
But it came upon the others more slowly that the familiar thrumming was gone, the sound caused by the stresses of the small gravitational tides which the drive created—a background noise so omnipresent that they had forgotten to hear it, a vibration once felt when they touched any part of the ship. Now the drive barely murmured as it protected
Pride
from collision, and the ship was silent save for that echo of power.
Rankin was delighted, since the pushmi-pullyu had temporarily disabled several of his instruments, including a sensitive and somewhat temperamental gravity-wave detector with which the astrophysics team hoped to map the curvature of space. Turning his interrupted sleep into an early rising, he plunged himself into calibrating his newly useful equipment.
Wenyuan also stayed up, joining Charan on the bridge. “What instructions were you given about the defense of this ship? Charan gave Wenyuan a sidelong glance.- “Defense against what?”
“It is a tragedy waiting to happen that we have been sent out here unarmed. You can be sure that the Senders were not so foolish. But we do not have to go as sheep to the slaughter simply because the Consortium was weak and short-sighted.”
“Oh? Is there a deep-space armory where unarmed ships can stock up?” Charan asked with a smirk.
“A commander who does not fear for his own life puts his entire command in peril. You should not take the danger so lightly.”
“Being without weapons is one of the conditions of the exercise. I don’t take it lightly. I take it as inevitable.”
“Perhaps not. I do not believe the military potential of the AVLO drive has been fully explored. If it were possible to project the pushmi-pullyu into the heart of an enemy ship, much good effect would result.”
“The inverse-square rule limits the range of the field. If that weren’t so, we would have been able to move it a few thousand metres off the bow and keep the original design—with the twelve-man crew,” Charan said, toggling an acknowledgement as a transmission from Earth ended.
“There are other possibilities. Our companion, for one,” said Wenyuan, referring to the rocklike aggregate of dust and micrometeoroids which had accreted in the drive’s gravitational well during acceleration and now paced
Pride of Earth
150 metres off its bow. “At space velocities, projectiles need not be explosive. If the drive could be used to sling our companion and objects like it at the enemy—”
“You can drop that line of thought,” Charan said sharply. “I won’t allow any tampering with the drive while we’re in-flight. Nothing is worth the risk of losing its primary function.”
“Then we must discover if the primary function can afford us some degree of protection. We should program a series of exercises to determine the ship’s maneuverability and see if we might hope to elude an attacker.”
Charan shook his head. “A starship isn’t a fighter plane—especially this starship. You can’t pull a 180-degree bank or a half loop, and if you could the G-forces would kill you. We can’t even decelerate as fast as we accelerated because we will experience real G-forces in that mode. Forget defense, Major. One of the reasons we were sent out is to gauge their intent with minimum risk. If their intent is hostile, we’re expendable—as soon as we get that word off to home. Personally, I think you’ve got an acute case of paranoia.”
But a few days later, Charan had cause to wonder. Rankin woke him, a worried look on his face, and asked him to come to the bridge. Wenyuan, working in the mod B transfer section, noted the break in routine and followed.
There Rankin showed both a graphic display from the gravity-wave detector. Four small dimples, one larger than the rest, were arrayed in a rough diamond shape on the grid that represented local space.
“I picked these up about ten minutes ago, lying directly ahead of us and a few million klicks below our flight path,” said Rankin.
“What
are
they?”
“I’m not sure yet. The smaller ones mass somewhere around 10 to the 19th tons, but with the degree of error in the low range I’d guess that could be off by three orders of magnitude either way. The big one is a monster—10 to the 27th easily.”
“Not comets, then.”
“Oh, absolutely not. Much too massive.”
“Warships,” Wenyuan said hoarsely. “Sender warships, slipping in ahead of their envoy ship decoy.”
“What about it?” asked Charan. “Is it possible?”
“I have trouble imagining warships the size of Earth’s moon.”
“The mass need not reflect the size of the ship itself. What kind of mass would we register with the drive on?” Wenyuan asked.
“Considerable,” said Rankin, his unhappy look darkening.
“So it could well be one capital ship with three escorts, all under their version of the AVLO drive,” Wenyuan said with concern.
“Are they moving?” asked Charan.
Rankin keyed up a data table and spent a few minutes studying it. “Their space velocity is such a small fraction of our own that I’d be tempted to call it zero,” he pronounced finally.
“They’re not heading for the solar system.”
“More importantly, if they’re that massive and the space velocity is just a few klicks per second, then they aren’t warships.”
“A half-strength field projected forward and aft would produce mass without motion,” said Wenyuan. “An excellent camouflage.”
“Any chance of picking them up optically and settling this?”
“Some. That’s why I got you up. Closest approach is in”—he looked up at the clock—“twelve minutes now. Will you take the bridge?”
“Keep us posted via the intercom.”
Charan sat frowning after Rankin left for the lab in mod B. “Open Audio 1 and Data 1 back to Earth,” he said finally. “Let’s send them the bridge audio and the gravity-wave data. If something happens, we’d better make sure they have enough pieces to put the puzzle together. And give us his telescanner output on the window.”
Wenyuan complied. “With your permission, I will perform a diagnostic check on the drive, in the event it might be needed.” Charan nodded wordlessly, then touched the intercom switch. “Anything?”
“Just hold on,” snapped Rankin.
Charan and Wenyuan waited in silence as the minutes dragged past. The telescopic view came up clear but meaningless to them.
“Perhaps I should wake up Joanna,” Charan mused aloud.
“Goddamn. Goddamn.
Goddamn
,” Rankin exclaimed.
“Something?” Charan asked.
“Not a warship. A Jupiter star!”
“Once more?”
“A dark companion! A star more massive than Jupiter but still too small for fusion. My God,” Rankin said with undisguised awe. “The Sun has a sister star—”
“There is no chance of error?” Wenyuan asked.
“It’s radiating in the infrared exactly as it should be. The smaller ones are its planets—planets where a sun has never risen. Planets cold as death. Captain Charan, we have to collect some data directly. You have to divert us, slow us down—even a few hours would be invaluable. This is an incredible discovery. At this distance and speed all I have is a blur in the telescanner and a dimple in the gravity waves. You have to let me get more.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” said Charan, aware of Wenyuan’s eyes on him. “Get what you can and we’ll send it back to Earth. The rest will have to wait for another ship and another time.”
“It wouldn’t delay our rendezvous even a week,” Rankin said angrily. “Sony. No diversions. No delays. Finish your observations and resume your watch.” He switched off the intercom. Wenyuan was smiling broadly. “Well, Captain. At least you are consistent.” Charan shrugged, unstrapped, and pushed off toward the passway. ‘Take the watch until he’s done.”
The Jupiter star incident cemented the last major dimension of
Pride of Earth
’s interpersonal dynamic in place. It drove Rankin away from Charan and by default toward Wenyuan. The two were united in their disgust at Charan’s singlemindedness, as well as by Wenyuan’s eager interest in the scientific package. Rankin happily showed him how to operate the telescanner node and how to read the gravity-wave plots, cheered that there was at least one other on board who thought what he did was worthwhile.
Meanwhile, Joanna was moving ever more deeply into self-isolation, pushed in that direction by her encounter with Wenyuan and pulled by the endless pages of the Book of Deeds. The book had clearly been assembled rather than written, and hurriedly at that. Some of the stories were detailed first-person accounts, some merely clips from newspapers and data bases. Most were contemporary, but a significant minority were historical, their protagonists drafted ex post facto into a church and body of belief which had not existed when they lived. Alone in her compartment, she read, pondered, and labored to integrate into a single view of human faith and existence thousands of accounts of human suffering.
The isolation that Joanna chose for herself imposed isolation on Charan. He did not overly regret it. There was a part of him that did not want to enjoy, even in small ways, his time on board. His presence was a duty, one final onerous duty before he would know freedom. He preferred his emotions simple and uncluttered, and to have found pleasure aboard
Pride of Earth
would have introduced an unwelcome ambivalence. The voyage was something to be endured, a responsibility to be discharged.
Another hundred fifty watches till meetpoint, another three thousand hours to be slept or idled away—
Enforcing the sense of isolation was the ever-growing lag in communications with Earth. Though there was a nearly constant flow of data and messages in both directions, it was a parallel monologue, not a conversation. At drive power-down they had already been ten light-days out, and every day after added eighteen hours to the lag.
Most affected was Rankin, whose warm phone calls to his wife were turned by time and distance into cold audio letters within the first week. After that, he never heard her voice light up at the sound of his, never heard her laughter on the heels of his jokes. Her replies were disconnected somehow, like just another show on the entertainment schedule PANCOMNET beamed to them.
That schedule brought to them images of Earth and news of those who populated it, both intended to reinforce their sense of purpose and connectedness. Instead it enforced their sense of separation, and by general unspoken consent the E-channel was blacked out except on the bridge. On its way to meetpoint,
Pride of Earth
was a quiet ship, as though the stillness of empty space through which it sped had reached through the hull of the ship to hush them.
Since the first day of the voyage,
Pride of Earth
had monitored the radio beacon from the Sender ship, the same endlessly repeating and as yet unanswered invitation first heard by Chandliss in the Idaho hills. It was a clarion call and a navigational aid, both impelling and guiding their approach.
One hundred twenty days from meetpoint, with the Sender ship still three-tenths of a light-year away,
Pride of Earth
at last began to answer with a beacon of its own.
On the same frequencies used to communicate with Earth, the envoy ship began to transmit a voice-normal recording of brief greetings by more than a hundred human speakers and in as many different tongues. There was no serious expectation that it would be received, nor if it were, that it would be understood. It had been assembled for local consumption, to help increase identification with the mission throughout the Consortium, and was broadcast back to Unity for that purpose.
The real message to the Senders was transmitted using the same frequencies and code as their own beacon. After a brief introduction identifying the Pangaean Consortium as the governing body of Earth and the crew of
Pride of Earth
as the Consortium’s appointed envoys, the fifteen-minute message turned technical. Among the data included were the various frequencies and formats in which the ship could send and receive information.
Also outlined in the message was the timing of the complex intercept maneuver which had been laid out by the mission planning team before departure. The intercept assumed that the Sender ship would by choice or necessity maintain its velocity throughout.
Sixty days before meetpoint,
Pride of Earth
would begin to dump off its outbound velocity at a more leisurely 5g equivalent. The slower rate was partly a concession to the crew’s loss of strength, since even with the AVLO drive’s braking they would feel a half-gee of false gravity, but also an effort to mask
Pride of Earth
’s capabilities as long as possible.
Turnover would come when the velocity dump was complete and the ship was motionless, sun-relative. Then the final acceleration phase would begin, this one inbound and designed to allow the alien ship to overtake
Pride of Earth
just as their velocities matched.
That was meetpoint: the two ships hurtling sunward in parallel trajectories a single light-minute apart.
While at Unity, Wenyuan had argued against giving the Senders any advance notice of their approach. But he hovered silently with the others in the bridge and made no protest as the first cycle of the message went out under Charan’s command. Perhaps he was merely bowing to Unity’s request for bridge video of the four of them (to be used during NET broadcasts of the event), or perhaps he had grown tired of fruitless protests. Charan did not know or care which.
“RSVP,” Rankin said softly as the first cycle of the message ended and Charan switched off the bridge audio outputs.