For Love and Glory

XLIV

Jump.

Abruptly the sky was strange, constellations Lissa had not seen since Dagmar was at the black holes. She glanced in what she knew was their direction, but found nothing. The light from their impact would not arrive here for several years yet, the particle radiation trailing after it in the course of decades. If any glow of their discs was naked-eye visible across four and a half parsecs, the sun she had reached drowned it out of vision.

With more than six times the mass of Sunniva or Sol, the giant shone a thousand times as fiercely. At the fifty astronomical units she had judged was a prudent distance for arrival, it gave two-fifths the blaze that fell on Asborg or Earth, luridly blue-white. Even heavily stopped down by the viewscreen, that was too much to look into, and in a well illuminated compartment it cast shadows.

Briefly, she must suppress terror. Free fall gave the body a senseless sense of tumbling down toward the fire. And they were, of course. Hulda had gone into hyperspace with an intrinsic velocity of some fifteen hundred kilometers per second. Potential differences could have changed it only slightly. She emerged with the vector pointed straight at the target star.

But that was all calculated beforehand. B types were rare enough that instruments had long since studied this one from afar. The basic parameters were known. Lissa had ordered Hulda to plot a course which put her north of the equatorial plane, her vector aimed inward. If she continued on the trajectory, she’d take more than a month to reach the distance at which she’d be too deeply in the gravitational well for hyperjump to work. Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen.

Dzesi hissed, Hebo whistled, sounds of awe, faint within the silence. “The sooner we commence observations, the better,” Lissa said.

The man regarded her for a second. “Sure,” he agreed slowly. “It’s just kind of an overwhelming sight.”

“Don’t let it be.”

He shook his head and clicked his tongue. “Well, women always were the practical-minded sex.”

Dzesi said nothing. Lissa wondered what she thought about the males of her own race.

They unharnessed, floated from their seats, and got to work. Mostly that was a matter of telling the ship what to do and trying to evaluate the results, but it quickly and utterly gripped them.

The instruments and computer programs aboard were meant for research, responsive to minimal data inputs. They scanned the equatorial plane, where they were likeliest to find anything extraordinary, to and fro across billions of kilometers. Glints appeared. Velocity gave parallaxes. “Yes,” Lissa whispered, “there are planets.”

Few giant suns seemed to have them, which was one reason that still fewer had yet been visited. Any such worlds must be barren. A star like this had only about eighty million years to exist on the main sequence, before it swelled and then exploded as a supernova. The scientific prize wasn’t judged worth the cost and hazard, when the galaxy swarmed with so much mystery and promise.

Hebo nodded. “I kind of figured we’d find an exceptional case here,” he said, himself gone prosaic again. “Planets provide stable platforms for observing, bases for expeditions to the site, and unlimited raw materials. Though if the sun was lonesome, I thought the Forerunners might have orbited something of their own anyhow. It didn’t form very long ago, cosmically speaking, which would’ve helped predict exactly where it’d be at crash time.”

“Have the Forerunners now returned?” wondered Lissa.

“That’s what we aim to find out, no? I doubt it, myself. Not their style. Makes more sense to leave some robots, probably dormant till the right time came nigh, that’d then build the necessary stuff and establish contact with the masters, wherever they are.”

After waiting at least three million years? Lissa shivered. This conversation was trivial, saying nothing they hadn’t said over and over to each other, but it comforted.

“Any signs of activity?” she asked.

“Nothing clearly identifiable,” the ship replied. “The signal-to-noise ratio should improve at lesser distances.”

Dzesi bristled. “Why are we waiting?” she demanded.

“For lunch,” Lissa said. More chatter, more fending off—less of fear than of a rising eagerness that could too readily override caution.

Then, jump.

The star flamed as brilliant as Sunniva over Asborg. The disc showed just a tenth as wide, but when the screen blanked it out, a corona sprang vast into view, rimmed at the hub with red tongues of prominence which could have incinerated a planet, its hue less pearly than fiercely white, the outer edges a breathtakingly lovely filigree.

Hulda reported a stellar windstorm. Any living creature caught in it, spacesuited or not, would take a lethal radiation dose within minutes. The wayfarers were safe. Their ship was made to survive terrible environs. Forcefields deflected particles well before they came near, so smoothly that the photons they spat when thus accelerated were a low-energy bombardment that the hull shielding easily absorbed.

However, no cause for complacency. The sun’s thermal emission peaked at a far harder wavelength than did a G-type’s. X-rays and even gamma rays abounded. They struck straight through, as did the neutrons they knocked out of atoms along the way, and the secondary particle showers they could touch off were worse. Simply the heat, the infrared, would make a furnace of the ship if she got too close.

At thirty AU, though, it was bearable. And—

“Definite indications from the second planet.” Hulda’s impersonal voice thrilled the three like a trumpet call. “Emission patterns characteristic of artificial conversions; some neutrino background suggesting nuclear processes, although not identifiable with any in my database.”

“We’d hardly expect that, would we?” muttered Hebo.

Displays and readouts gave details. Too vague, too sparse. Lissa instructed the ship to plan a pattern of movements and observations.

They ventured closer. Jumping from point to point across interplanetary distances added perspectives, making a kind of interferometry possible. Hour by hour by hour, truth emerged.

At the end of one leap, the hull tolled. Hulda bounced off on a wild new trajectory, whirling crazily. The travelers were flung back and forth against their safety harnesses. Outrageous gyrations left them fighting nausea.

Yet they found they were alive, unhurt, their ship intact.

Hulda won back to control of herself. She told them what had happened.

Apparently asteroidal debris was strewn throughout the system. That was no surprise. The typical giant star had nothing more to companion it; radiation and gravitational gradients inhibited further condensation from a primordial molecular cloud. This one was exceptional in having a few attendant globes, none much larger than Asborg. Everything else that orbited it was minor, and not quickly detectable from a distance. By sheer unlikeliness, Hulda had returned to normal space in front of a solid metallic mass some ten kilometers across.

The collision would have proven disastrous for any vessel less resistant. Forcefields stronger than most took the shock. Perforce they transmitted some of it to the ship. But they distributed it, and that hull was built of materials well-nigh as tough as the laws of nature permit, to a design intended to withstand impacts. Hulda simply recoiled and, briefly, tumbled. The scarred, pitted mass dwindled away into remoteness.

Hebo and Lissa stared into one another’s eyes. “My God,” he stammered, “you, you could’ve been killed.”

“You too,” she dimly heard out of a mouth gone dry.

“Nobody was,” Dzesi snarled. “Carry on.”

They did.

It was impossible to approach the planet that lured them. Mars-sized, eccentrically orbiting at about one AU, an airless, waterless waste of rock glowing red-hot by day and always spitting induced radioactivity, it revealed little more than that at half a dozen points on its surface there were centers of electronics, nucleonics, hyperonics, and who could tell what else?

“We couldn’t make anything like this,” Lissa murmured. “They knew more about high-energy conditions back then than we do today.”

“We will learn,” Dzesi declared, “whether they want us to or no.”

Lissa tautened. “If they don’t, we won’t.”

“Are you certain?”

Hebo’s hand chopped air. “Friends,” he said, “at this stage those aren’t questions, they’re gabble.”

Yes, he can think, Lissa thought.

Hebo rubbed his chin. “But, y’know, this does seem a little odd. Sure, stations on yonder ball would have all the power, free, they’d ever need. But one hell of a set of background counts too. Sure, the instruments can filter out the noise as well as quantum mechanics allows. But would that satisfy? Especially when other sites are available as well. I say we should look wider, as long as we’re here.” He paused. “Might even find things we can look at close up.”

His companions agreed. While Hulda retreated outward, Lissa sent a hyperwave message home. Whatever happened, their discoveries must not be lost. She sent it encrypted, though, addressed to her father with a request for secrecy. Not wise to publicize the expedition at once. Too many unknowns, rivalries, tensions.

Why couldn’t humans, and other mortals, simply get on with the business of understanding the miraculous universe that was theirs and becoming one with it?

Maybe because they were mortals?

She shrugged. More urgent and interesting questions lay at hand.

Hulda leaped and peered.

Yes!

Activity, not identical with that at the inner world, but as clearly technological, on another planet, nearly a hundred AU from the great sun.

Hebo nodded. “Makes sense. Long-base interferometry. And you can take advantage of the low temperatures to do stuff you couldn’t easily do close in. They complement each other.”

Dzesi leaped in microgee, caromed off two bulkheads, came to a midair stop in a crouch as if readying to attack a foe. “We can land there!” she cried.

“Maybe, maybe,” Lissa said, though the idea thrilled in her too. “Let’s take a rest—we certainly need one—and then talk about it.”

She never did quite get to sleep. Maybe her shipmates didn’t either. Well, Dzesi. …

The decision was to go, carefully, calling home again in the course of it. To shed their velocity, they would hyperjump to a point from which they could back down on their goal, decelerating at one-half gravity: more slowly than they left Sunniva, but giving more time and space for forewarning of danger. This enterprise was chancy at best.

The crossing from emergence to destination would take about seventy hours, almost three standard days and nights. That would also let them prepare themselves.