There he surprised her again, dismissing the security contingent. When they were alone, he turned to her. “Chancellor, I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t realize until now how severe the restrictions placed on you were,” he said. “I don’t think they were justified, and I’ve instructed Governor White to lift them. I’ve also reviewed the evidence Colonel Shields intended to use in his complaint against you, and I didn’t find it persuasive. No complaint will be made.”
It was probably as close to an apology as Wells was capable of offering, but it was not enough. “Does this mean that you will recall the Triads?”
Wells avoided looking directly at her. “Let’s leave that discussion until after
Falcon
’s recon,” he said, starting down the corridor. He took a few steps, then stopped and looked back at her. “Oh, and Captain Killea has been rather anxiously trying to reach you for three days. Because he couldn’t, he’s got that ship and crew locked up as tight as if they were in Contact quarantine. When we get to the situation room, would you please call over to him and free the slaves?”
Though it was not immediately obvious, the system map on the curved screen of Teo Farlad’s battle couch was among the most complicated in the ship’s library. Within the small region of the Galaxy explored by humankind there were binary and trinary suns aplenty, and no shortage of stars with ten, twelve, or fifteen major satellites. But the seven elements included on Farlad’s map were all suns—seven suns clustered in one tiny area of the sky, so closely that to an observer on Earth they merged into what the eye saw as only two lights, a lesser and a greater.
But Farlad and
Falcon
saw them as they really were—not two stars but two families of stars. The two brightest of the seven, brilliant emerald-white twins orbiting each other so closely that they would easily have fit inside the orbit of Mercury, formed the core of one cluster. A trio of dimmer stars orbited the twins at a distance of more than two light-days. In the millennia since the Mizari attack on the Weichsel, the trio had completed only five leisurely circuits of the central pair. This was Anak al Banat, Zeta Ursae Majoris, The Horse—Mizar.
Lying a quarter cee to the east but sharing the same motion through space were two white stars, each only a few times brighter than Sol—Alcor, The Rider, The Lost One. Here, as from Earth, it was clearly the lesser member of the stellar partnership. Even so, it was
Falcon
’s primary destination, for Alcor was the apparent source of the discordant radio signature thought to betray the Mizari’s presence.
The Alcor signature was three times as energetic as that emanating from Phad and several dozen times more powerful than the emissions from the Alphecca nest. Even so, it was but a whisper, a flickering candle in the night.
Until a few days ago there had been some question whether the signature arose from the twin suns themselves somehow or from a body orbiting them. Viewed from the observatory at Lynx, Alcor showed no planetary spoor, even though astrophysical modeling of the system showed that it was stable enough to have allowed planets to form. There were limits to the resolving power of the Lynx instruments, but even so, some quietly started to wonder about the admittedly remote possibility of star-based life.
Falcon
had ended that debate when it dropped briefly out of the craze for a pre-survey navigation hack. From half a cee away it was clear that the signature was coming from a planet orbiting the twin suns at a distance of eleven light-minutes. They had taken its measure as best they could, plotted its orbit, and given it a name—6UMa-A1. Then
Falcon
had hied back into the craze while its crew worked out the details of its appointment with the Mizari.
The ship was on her way to keep that appointment now. Farlad touched a key with his right index finger, and a fourth of his display was filled with the telecam image of Alcor B. The main sequence sun lay just five light-minutes ahead on
Falcon
’s track. With its portrait digitally processed for maximum clarity, Alcor B showed a face marred by great magnetic storms and a limb made ragged by fiery prominences.
Spanning a quarter of a million kilometres each second,
Falcon
continued to dive directly toward Alcor B at a velocity that, unchanged, would take it deep into the star’s turbulent photosphere. But that was not
Falcon
’s destiny. Already the ship’s main drive was singing as it drew energy from the spindle, killing off velocity at a twelve-gee rate.
Farlad was aware that his back muscles were knotted with tension. Coming out of the craze so close to a star, and at as shallow an angle to the system ecliptic as
Falcon
had, was a high-risk maneuver—but a purposeful one.
Falcon
was using Alcor B as a shield, masking its presence as long as possible from the inhabitants of 6UMa-A1. By hiding in Alcor B’s optical and radar shadow until the last moment, then translating just enough to skim the photosphere,
Falcon
would remain undetectable almost up until the moment the survey began.
For any other Service vessel except a Triad lineship, the planetary detritus encountered during the headlong dive through the system, together with the furious radiation absorbed during the stellar pass, would likely have meant its destruction. But
Falcon
had been built to withstand that and more.
Almost before Farlad was ready, the gyros altered the ship’s attitude, and the programmed deflection around Alcor B began. The stellar pass was harrowing, even though the shields and radiators dealt easily with all but a tiny fraction of the complex incoming radiation. Farlad could not shake the image of
Falcon
as a moth dancing too near the flame. To his great relief the pass was over in a matter of ninety seconds, and 6UMa-A1 replaced Alcor B on the displays.
Unless there was a serious gap in the data collected the first time, because of instrument failure or interference from the ground, there would be only one fly by. Twenty minutes inbound—twenty minutes outbound. There was no time to waste, and the increased traffic on the ship’s command net reflected that urgency.
“Instrument pods, deploy.”
“Track and timeline nominal.”
“Nav hack, on the mark.”
Though he was nominally in charge of data management, there was little for Farlad to do at this juncture but watch to see that the system followed the rules programmed into it. Data from the dozens of passive instruments focused on 6UMa-A1 was being funneled directly into the multiband Kleine link. The data cache was less than ten percent full, and that only due to data held for retransmission.
But the cache would quickly fill when the link reached its capacity and a backlog began to build. As
Falcon
drew closer to the planet the improving resolution would increase the data load, as would the entry of the active instruments into the system. Due to the lag at this distance, there was as yet no data from the mapping radar or other active instruments, but during the last third of the approach they would pick up the echoes of the energies they were now focusing on the Mizari world. Then Farlad would have to take a more active role.
With every passing moment
Falcon
moved closer to meeting the primary criterion for a successful mission: relaying good data to DIDAC. Farlad listened to the chatter as the survey techs plucked bits of data from the stream. An oxysilicate world with a cold inert core and one large moon. Nothing distinctive—but there were puzzles.
“Frosty down there—280 absolute. But it shouldn’t even be that warm—”
“Picking up indications of a nonpolar magnetic field. Damn, how can they generate that—”
“Atmospheric pressure 285 millibars—an easy ride down for the deedees. But a rock that size should have held more air—”
“The EM detectors are picking up the signature from all over the surface of the planet—from the surface of the moon too—”
“Where are the rest of the planets? There should be more planets—”
The Kleine link was at capacity now, and the data cache was filling. Looking at the data that had already gone out, Farlad adjusted the priorities assigned to the various instruments so the more critical observations went directly into the link. Top priority went to the active instruments, which caught the echoes of their first probings as
Falcon
closed to within a million kilometres of the planet. At the same time the sending portion of those instruments shut down, lest they provide Mizari gunners with an easy means of tracking their target.
As
Falcon
raced on toward its closest approach to 6UMa-A1, Farlad began to allow himself to think about the chances of meeting the secondary criterion for success: survival. If the ship got as far as the outbound phase, her chances of survival were markedly better. Outbound, her speed would work for her, not against her. Outbound, Captain Rukekin had the authority to break off the survey and run—
But a bare three minutes from close-approach, almost as though Farlad had jinxed the mission by his presumption, the contact alarm sounded. Immediately Farlad reshuffled the priorities to make sure the battle-management data got through to DIDAC. Almost as immediately the throughput on the relay link plummeted. It was as dramatic a drop as might have been caused by all the high-band channels crashing at once. But there was nothing wrong with the hardware.
Farlad had no other duties under a contact alert, so he eavesdropped on the command net, looking for answers. The fear and barely contained panic he heard there brought him no comfort.
“Where the hell did it come from, that sector was clear—”
“I get no range vector, our probe’s passing right through it as if it weren’t there—”
Farlad heard the high-energy crackle of the lance firing, once, twice, again, and still again. The ship seemed to shudder, and the tumult on the command net devolved into raw static. Farlad suddenly knew that the egglike couch was about to become his coffin. He wanted to throw back the overhead hatch and climb off his back and into the access corridor, to run downship to the tanks and so not die alone. But it was already too late—the ejection countdown was flashing on his display, and the couch had begun to rotate from the vertical to the horizontal in preparation.
But it was also too late for that. In consecutive instants the couch ground to a stop halfway through its translation, and the access corridor lights went dark. There was heat without fire and Farlad’s body screamed, but his mind watched detachedly as his own skin browned and blackened and crinkled. Then his eyes burned, too, and he was blind for the last long moment of agony that preceded the end of all sensation.
Shocked silence reigned in the situation room when
Falcon
’s transmission abruptly terminated. The expressions on the faces of the senior command staff ranged from Yamakawa’s disgruntled frown to Captain Elizin’s mask of horror. Sujata had to fight with herself not to turn away from the sight of her waking nightmare becoming real. Now she steadied herself with a hand on a nearby wall and fought to control herself-betraying panting breaths and racing heart.
“All right,” Yamakawa said finally. “We’ve lost a ship and some good men. Let’s dig in and find out what we got in exchange. We have one hour to figure out what to tell
Kite
when she reaches Phad, and five hours until Triad One hits its wave-off.”
“There’s only one thing to tell
Kite
,” Sujata said, stepping forward. “To abort her mission. And the same for Triad One. Tell them to come home.”
Yamakawa regarded her with a curiously impersonal gaze, as though she were a thing that had had the impertinence to step outside of its place. Then he turned his back on her and ignored her, as he had since Wells had brought her into the room forty minutes earlier.
“The attack came approximately eight minutes after the, first opportunity for the Mizari to detect
Falcon
emerging from the stellar shadow,” he said, addressing Wells. “That puts the upper limit on their response time. We ought to be able to get some idea of their sensing capability by looking at the
Munin
incident in that light.”
“
Kite
’s target orbits tighter to its star than
Falcon
’s did to Alcor,” Venngst said, consulting his slate. “If
Kite
makes its pass at, oh, seventy-cee instead of fifty-cee, she should be able to reach her breakaway point safely, with only a modest degradation of the data quality—”
Sujata could scarcely believe what she was witnessing, how easily they wrote off
Falcon
’s dead as the price for what they’d learned. Only Elizin still seemed to be shaken, and no one seemed to notice. And yet they seemed blind to the meaning of the truths blood had bought.
“What more do you need to know?” she demanded, advancing on Yamakawa. “What’s the point of risking the crew of
Kite
? Mr. Brodini,” she said, turning on the Strategy Committee’s tactics expert. “If
Falcon
had been a Triad carrier, would she have been close enough to release her deedees?”
Brodini glanced nervously in Yamakawa’s direction before answering. “No, Chancellor. But a carrier would have had support from its lineships—”
“For how long? Eight minutes? Five? Three? Who’s to say they can’t atomize three ships at that distance as easily as they did one?”
Venngst began, “I see no reason for consistently under valuing our capabilities and overvaluing theirs—”
Sujata whirled to face Wells. “How are you going to fight that?” she demanded, pointing a finger at the image of the black star frozen on a display. “You heard
Falcon
’s crew—it came out of nowhere. The lances couldn’t touch it. It destroyed a heavily shielded recon ship as easily as it did
Munin
. Whatever it is, it had enough power in it to cross eighty light years and still destroy most of life on Earth. How can you think of fighting it?” Wells looked away from her and up at the display. “We have options. There has to be a way,” he said.
“What would you have us do, Chancellor?” Shields asked in a hard-edged voice. “Surrender without fighting? They’ve destroyed two of our ships—killed thirty-one of our people. We can’t let them get away with that.”