Chindi

Chapter 11

HUTCH HAD COLLECTED some soil samples, which she added to her scrapings. She also had air samples, taken from Safe Harbor by probe. She scanned everything, and sent the results to Outpost.

The research vessel Jessica Brandeis duly arrived, optimistically carrying a medical staff as well as a team of engineering specialists. By then, the Memphis had recovered more body parts and pinpointed the vectors of most of the larger pieces of wreckage.

She was delighted to turn the salvage operation over to Edward C. Park, the captain of the Brandeis.

They’d been able to identify seven of the eleven persons on board, including Preach. In his case there had only been a blackened arm, but the fourth finger had worn the eagle ring. She removed it while her stomach churned. She had swallowed her grief as best she could, said good-bye to him, giving up all hope that he’d pull off one more miracle. Then she’d set the ring for delivery to next of kin.

When it was over, after Park officially took charge, she pointedly avoided the temptation to retreat to her quarters, but stayed instead in mission control or in the common room, where there was always someone else.

The Memphis transferred the remains of the Condor personnel and the recovered wreckage to the Brandeis. When that painful operation had been completed, Park went looking for more debris.

Meanwhile, the moonbase scan results came back from Outpost.

They specified the chemical composition of the various hatches, instruments, shelves, and whatnot. She saw nothing out of the ordinary. But the age of the base was estimated at fourteen hundred standard years.

That widened everyone’s eyes. My God, it went back to the time of Charlemagne.

But the numbers fit with the estimates from the air samples defining when the nuclear explosions had taken place.

There was another surprise in the report: Whoever had taken a laser to the cargo door had done it roughly twelve centuries ago. Two hundred years later.

So apparently someone had survived.

PARK CALLED TO inform her he’d found the stealth satellite that Preach had been taking on board at the time of the incident. “Or, more accurately,” he corrected himself, “some of the pieces.”

“Be careful.”

“We will.” She saw that he shared her suspicion that the stealth had been involved in the destruction of the Condor.

“Are you scanning it?”

“We intend to.”

“Good. When you send the results to Outpost, ask them to check on the energy source. And we’d also like to know how old it is.”

GEORGE RARELY CAME by the bridge, unless something was happening. She sensed that he liked being in charge, and that the bridge put him at a disadvantage. But nevertheless there he was, standing uncertainly at the door. “I’ve been thinking about this place,” he said. “And I don’t understand what’s been happening here.”

“You mean what happened to the Condor?”

“That, too. Mostly I don’t understand who got to the moon two hundred years after the war. They must have all died during the war, right? I mean, who could have survived?”

“I don’t know. Somebody did.”

“That’s right. Somebody cut their way into the moonbase.” He leaned back against a console. “Who?”

“I’ve no idea, George. Nor have I any suggestion how to find out.”

“I might.” He broke away from the console, crossed the bridge, and sat down in the right-hand chair. The navigational screens, showing images from the ground at differing magnifications, caught his eye. “I think there’s a connection with the stealth satellites,” he said. “They’re the other piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit. I mean, I can understand they might have been using them to spy on each other. But why put some of them out at 1107?”

Hutch didn’t have an answer for that either.

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I wonder how old the satellites are.”

“We’ll find out when the next report comes in from Outpost. But I assume they’re fourteen hundred years old. They have to date from about the time of the war.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Fourteen hundred years is a long time.”

That was true. The stealth at 1107 was still transmitting. That was pretty good for a piece of hardware fourteen centuries old.

“Have we looked to see whether there are other stealths in orbit around Safe Harbor?”

Hutch had considered the possibility, concluded there probably were, but didn’t see what could be gained by finding one. In fact, if there were any, she didn’t think she’d want to go near them. Damned things were dangerous.

George read her concern. “We can be careful,” he said. “But we ought to take a look. Poke it with a stick if we have to.”

“Why do we care?”

“Maybe it doesn’t end here,” he said.

“Maybe what doesn’t end?”

“Have you considered the possibility the locals didn’t put up the stealths?”

It was a thought. But if they hadn’t, who had? “You think somebody else was here?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

THEY ASSUMED THAT the stealths would be lined up for ideal reception, which put them in an orbit whose plane was perpendicular to 1107.

“If that’s so,” said Bill, “it’ll look like this.” He drew a circle around Safe Harbor that varied thirty-seven degrees above and below the equator.

At the neutron star, there’d been a signal to track. Here, they were looking at the receiving end of the system. That meant they had to go in close and try visually to find the satellites. In this, they had the advantage that the stealth methodology was far less effective than a lightbender would have been.

The problem was to guess the altitude of the orbit. Where had the stealth been when the Condor intercepted it?

They needed almost two days, with everyone watching the screens, before Alyx saw what appeared to be, as she described it, “some reflections.”

Hutch looked carefully at it and saw a small patch of sky that seemed a trifle darker than its surrounding area. Furthermore, two stars appeared to be duplicated. They moved closer and aimed the Memphis’s lights at the anomaly. The beams seemed to twist.

“What do we do now?” asked Tor. “If it’s booby-trapped, we don’t want to go near it.”

“Let’s whack it and see what it does. Bill—”

“Yes, Hutch?” Innocently.

“Send something over to give it a shove.”

The AI’s features snapped onto her comm screen. “Probe away,” he said.

The probe was a communication-and-sensor package of the type usually dropped into hostile atmospheres. She watched it go, powered by its thrusters, steered by the AI.

“Looks good,” she said.

Bill appeared beside her. “One minute.”

George’s people were making bets on the result. She wondered what it said about the human race that the odds were six to one for an explosion. She expected one herself.

The package closed on the disturbance.

The Brandeis watched from a safe distance.

At Bill’s command, the package angled left and ran directly into the stealth. It struck the vehicle dead center, in the middle of the diamond, and wobbled off.

Nothing happened.

Bill brought the unit around, hit the satellite a couple more times, and then sent the package into one of the dishes. It had by then become less than fully responsive and it hit too hard. The dish broke off, popped into visibility, and drifted away, trailing cable. At about twenty meters, the cable drew taut and the dish began to drag behind.

“Satisfied?” Bill asked.

“Yeah. That’s enough.”

“What are you going to do now?” asked Park.

“Have a closer look,” she said. “I’m going over in the lander.”

“Why?”

Why? She wasn’t sure. She wanted to find out what had killed Preach. She owed him that much. And she felt she could do it in relative safety. Forewarned, she was sure she could take a look without setting the damned thing off. “To find out whether it’s a bomb,” she said.

“That’s not a good idea, Hutch.”

“I know. I’ll be careful.”

When she got down to the lander, Tor was waiting. “I’ll go along,” he said, “if you don’t object.”

She hesitated. “Provided you do what I tell you.”

“Sure.”

“No debates.”

“No debates.”

“Okay. Get in.”

Park was still trying to talk her out of it. “The fact that the explosion happened while they were examining the damned thing can’t be a coincidence,” he insisted. It didn’t take a genius. “Let the bomb people come out and look at it.”

“That’ll take forever.”

So the Brandeis stood by while she set off in the lander. The stealth floated out there, not quite visible, but its presence was betrayed by a twisting of light, a sense of movement, a place that was alternately bright and dark for no apparent reason. It was like a ghostly presence in a dimly lit room.

Tor looked down into the atmosphere. They were crossing the largest of Safe Harbor’s continents, passing above a mountain range.

She still couldn’t see the object itself, and was dependent on Bill for navigational assistance.

Park kept giving her advice.

“You might want to rethink this.”

“Heads up now.”

“Don’t get too close.”

“Ed,” she asked, “can’t you find something else to do for a few minutes?”

She activated her e-suit, but when Tor started to follow her lead, she shook her head. “Stay here,” she said. “There’s no need for both of us to be out there.”

He started to protest, but she looked at him and he demurred.

The satellite was a disturbance at twilight, a shifting of light tones not quite seen. But it was impossible not to know something was there.

She put on a go-pack and stepped into the airlock. “Tell me what to do,” he said.

“Just stay put. If something happens, you’re the backup. Rescue me. If you can’t, clear out. Tell Bill to take you back to the ship. Under no circumstances monkey with the satellite.”

SHE USED THE go-pack to circle the object. Even from a few meters, the thing had no definition, but was rather a swirl of darkness and mirror images. She didn’t touch it until she’d finished a complete scan. The AI detected the field device which coordinated the unit’s stealth capabilities.

“If I shut it off,” she told Tor, “we’ll be able to see what we’re working with.”

“If you shut it off,” said Tor, “it might explode.”

“No. Can’t be.” The satellite that Preach had shown her had been shut down. And it hadn’t blown up.

“But maybe it starts a timer.”

He had a point. Well, she would find out. She maneuvered in close, found the switch, hesitated for the briefest moment, and moved it to its opposite setting. Off.

Nothing happened.

She retreated to the lander, climbed inside, and they withdrew to a thousand meters. And waited.

Still nothing.

They gave it two hours. When the time expired, and the satellite remained quietly whole, she returned to it.

She went over it with a scanner, assembled a complete schematic, collected more scrapings, and waved to Tor, who was watching anxiously from the pilot’s seat. She was getting advice from everybody by then. Especially from Tor. Mostly it consisted of Don’t touch anything and Look out now.

When she was finished she went back to the lander. They rendezvoused with the Memphis and she forwarded the results to Outpost.

THE SETUP WAS the same as at 1107. Hutch used the position of the stealth to calculate the locations of the other two satellites. They found one of them. The missing one, of course, would be the satellite that the Condor had located.

They were congratulating themselves on their success when the results came in from the Brandeis transmission.

It contained a surprise. The stealth that the Condor had been examining at the time of the incident was less than a century old. Closer, the experts thought, to eighty years.

It was brand-new.

LATE THAT EVENING, the Brandeis found sections of the engine room. By morning, Park had concluded that the fusion engines had exploded. “We don’t know why,” he told Hutch, “but at least we can dismiss the idea there’s something spooky running around out here.”

“I guess I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

“Something else: The stealth you looked at.”

“What about it?”

“It’s active. The imagers react to light. Change their focus. Look at sunrises, sunsets. They even took a look at us.”

“They watched you?”

“Yes.”

This kept getting stranger. “Is it still watching you?”

“No. We moved off behind it. I don’t think it can see us anymore.”

PARK’S PEOPLE SPENT two days climbing around on the stealth. The unit was a sophisticated package of sensors, telescopes, and antennas. It had computers and navigation equipment and thrusters, to allow it to adjust position. It had radio transmitters and receivers. And early analysis indicated it used vacuum energy as its power source. But it had no explosive device.

“Not bad,” said one of the technicians. “I’m not sure we could have designed something like this.”

“The pieces don’t fit,” George said that night. “They’re capable of going out to 1107, but they don’t have lightbender technology. And the bus at their moonbase looked pretty primitive.”

“We have different levels of technology on display, too,” said Tor. “There are still satellites in orbit that were put up by the Soviets.”

“What I’d like to know,” said Pete, “is whether this is the same kind of device that’s orbiting 1107.”

They were treating themselves to pastries, wine, and cheese. The gloom of the first days following the loss of the Condor had been partially dissipated by the successful (that is, uneventful) exploration of the moonbase. They had a major find. There were a few questions to be answered, but they were feeling pretty good. A survey mission was being assembled and would be there in a few months. Park and some of his people joined them, congratulated them, and he announced he’d finished everything he could do and was returning to Outpost in the morning.

Pete had been quiet most of the evening. He was sitting, enjoying a jelly donut. He’d gotten some of the powdered sugar on his nose but hadn’t seemed to notice. “I just don’t believe it,” he said abruptly. His eyes found Hutch. “The notion that the engines happened to explode just as they were starting to look at the satellite isn’t credible.”

“What other explanation is there?” asked Nick, reasonably.

Nobody had an answer.

AFTER THE MEETING drifted to an uncertain close, and Park and his people had returned to the Brandeis, Hutch went back to the bridge.

One of the disadvantages of living for an extended time on any of the Academy’s superluminals was that there were no places that guaranteed isolation from the other passengers, save in a private compartment. There was no such thing as a remote restaurant or a rooftop or a park bench.

Hutch needed someone. Captains were expected to maintain the tradition of not mixing romance with their passengers. But she felt desolate. She’d have liked to spend an evening somewhere with Tor. Not that she expected that particular romance, long dead, to reignite. Or even that she would have wanted it to reignite. But increasingly, since Preach had gone down, she’d felt the need for an intimate evening with somebody. She needed somebody to talk with, someone to look at her with longing, someone with whom she could retreat into the distance and pretend the past week had not happened.

She’d been given only a few hours with Preacher Brawley, and yet his loss had hit her hard. She found herself thinking about him at odd moments, during conversations with Bill, during meetings like the one she’d just attended, during workouts in the gym. She remembered how he had looked on that one rainy night in Arlington.

Gregory MacAllister had written somewhere that life was a series of blown opportunities. She remembered the Overlook and Beth the Singer and the good night kiss and watching his taxi turn back in the direction from which they’d come.

To Beth?

She shook it off and was grateful to hear someone enter. She noticed the lights were dim and brought them up to normal. It was Nick.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Am I disturbing you?” He was carrying a flask and two glasses.

“No,” she said. “Come in.”

“I thought you could use a drink.”

She invited him to sit. “I think I already had too many.”

He filled the glasses with dark wine and held one out for her. She took it, smiled politely at it, and set it down on the console.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Sure. Why do you ask?”

“It’s quiet up here.” He sipped his drink. “The lights were down. I just thought you haven’t really been yourself lately. But I can understand it.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

He nodded. “Maybe it’s time to start home.”

“Is that the consensus?”

“We’ve been talking about it. George’ll stay out here forever if he can. He’s got some puzzles to play with. And he wants to go down to the ground.”

“He can’t do that.”

“I know that. So does he. It drives him crazy. He thinks the Academy mission’ll be here in a few months, and they’ll take Safe Harbor away from him. This whole thing will become somebody else’s game.”

The wine looked cool and inviting. “None of us really gets what we want,” she said. “He’s lucky. You all are. You came out here and struck a mother lode. A place where there was actually a civilization. Where there are ruins. This only happens every twenty years or so.” She lifted the glass and tasted the wine. It slid down her throat and warmed her. “No, nobody’ll take this away. The books will remember you and George and the Condor. The follow-up mission”—she shrugged—“they’ll come out and do their work, but this place will always belong to the Contact Society.”

He was quiet for a time. She liked Nick. He was one of those rare people whose presence made her feel warm and comfortable. “Tell me how a funeral director,” she said suddenly, “got interested in extraterrestrials.”

His expression changed, lightened. “Just like anybody else. When I was a boy, I had too much imagination. Something in the water, I guess.” He looked at the wine, tasted it, decided it was good. “I never really got away from it. But as I got older my perspective changed.”

“In what way?”

“I think much the way George does. There are some questions I’d like answered.”

“For example?”

“‘Is there a creator?’”

“You expect to find an answer out here?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“‘Is there a purpose to being alive?’ ‘Is there a point to it all?’” His gray eyes found hers.

Bill’s lamp came on. He had something for her. Not an emergency, though, or he’d simply have broken in.

“My profession is peculiar. We render a service people can’t do without. But we’re never taken seriously, except by mourners. People think of us as caricatures. Figures of fun.”

Hutch recalled her own amusement when she’d first learned of Nick’s profession.

“That’s why I’m still fascinated by ETs.” He leaned forward, his voice suddenly intense. “I have a talent for talking with people in times of stress. Everybody in my business does. You don’t survive without it. Survivors have a hard time at the end. I’m good at helping. At being there when a widow or a parent really needs somebody.” His eyes softened. “I’d love to be able to tell people that it’s really okay. That there’s a caretaker.”

“They hear that anyway.”

“Not from me.” He finished the wine and put the cup down. “I’d like to think it’s true.”

She looked at him.

“You’re right. I won’t find the answer out here. But for whatever reason, the question seems more real. Life at home is superficial. Here, we’re down to basics. If there’s an Almighty, this is where He hangs out. I can almost feel His presence.”

“Good luck,” she said.

“I know. George thinks we might eventually find an elder race. Somebody we can put the question to. Somebody who’s figured it out.”

“They won’t know either.”

“Probably not,” he said. “But there’s a chance. And that chance is why we came.”

She reached over, touching his wrist with her fingertips. He smiled sadly.

They needed a distraction so she switched over to Bill. “Am I interrupting?”

“No, Bill.” She sighed. “What do you have?”

“Transmission from Outpost.”

“Let’s see it.”

It was Jerry Hooper again. “We’ve looked at all three stealths,” he said. “They’re identical units.” He looked puzzled. “The first one you found is a hundred years old. More or less.” His eyebrows went up and the tip of his tongue played at the corners of his lips. “The others, the third one and the one Preach took on board, they go back more than twenty centuries.”

“Before the war,” Nick said.

It was as if the warm place they’d created on the bridge had turned official again. They were over the night side, and Hutch could see nothing of the ground below save the glowing haze of atmosphere along the rim of the world.

“Is that possible?” he asked.