Golden Fleece

TWO

MASTER CALENDAR DISPLAY • CENTRAL CONTROL ROOM

STARCOLOGY DATE: MONDAY 6 OCTOBER 2177

EARTH DATE: SUNDAY 18 APRIL 2179

DAYS SINCE LAUNCH: 739 ▲

DAYS TO PLANETFALL: 2.229 ▼

“Aaron, we have an emergency. Wake up. Wake up now.”

It was an autonomic response for me, completed before I could even think of halting it. In retrospect, I’m hard-pressed to say which of my algorithms initiated my locator program first. Aaron’s job, although he hadn’t had a lot to do so far, was supervising Starcology Argo’s fleet of landing craft. Certainly there was a hard-coded directive that required him to be notified immediately of any accident involving those ships. But Aaron, by coincidence, had also recently ended a two-year marriage contract to Diana Chandler. There was a next-of-kin routine that would seek out the closest relative of anyone injured or killed. That Aaron was, by virtue of their divorce, no longer Diana’s next-of-kin had probably invoked a judgment circuit to resolve the inconsistency. That would have delayed the decision to contact him on those grounds for a few nanoseconds, likely allowing the job-related summoning of him to trigger my speakers first.

Next to Aaron lay Kirsten Hoogenraad, M.D., eyes closed but wide awake. Something had been interfering with her sleep of late. Perhaps it was simply that she was unused to sharing a bed, at least for the purpose of getting rest. In any event, she jumped at the sound of my voice and, propping herself up on one elbow, shook Aaron’s shoulder. Normally, I bring up the lights slowly when someone is waking, but this was no time for gentleness. I snapped the overhead panels to full illumination.

Aaron’s EEG shuddered into consciousness, whatever dream he had been having dissolving as wave fronts cascaded together. I spoke again. “We have an emergency, Aaron. Get out of bed quickly.”

“JASON?” He rubbed yellow crystals from his eyes. Implanted on the inside of his left wrist was my medical sensor, which doubled as a watch. He squinted at its glowing digital display. “You mystic! Do you know what time it is?”

“The lander Orpheus has just taken off,” I said through twin speakers on the headboard. That did it. He rolled out of bed, flat feet slapping the floor, and stumbled across the room to retrieve his pants from where he’d left them, tossed in a heap with one leg inside out.

There was no point in telling him to hurry. His heart was beating somewhat erratically and his EEG made clear that he was still fighting to wake up. An inefficient boot-up procedure if you ask me.

“Please call an elevator,” said Aaron, his voice dry and husky. That’s what he gets for sleeping with his mouth open.

“I already have one waiting,” I said. Kirsten was ready to go, pulling the belt of her blue velour robe tight at her waist. The action accentuated the lines of her figure.

I slid both the bedchamber and main apartment doors aside, the hisses of their mechanisms rising and falling quickly. Kirsten darted down the corridor and entered the waiting lift, quite unnecessarily putting her hand on the rubber molding along the edge of the open door as if to keep it from closing. Aaron thundered along the hallway and joined her.

The car began its fifty-four-level drop. The elevator itself operated silently, running on pink antigrav motors in a vacuum shaft. But I always whistled a descending tone through my speakers when the cylindrical cabs were going down and an ascending tone when they were going up. It had started as a joke: I’d expected someone to realize that the damned things should have been silent. So far, seventy-three million elevator rides to my credit, no one had noticed.

Aaron looked up at my paired cameras, mounted above the elevator door. “How did it happen?”

“The ship was appropriated,” I said, “for reasons unknown.”

“Appropriated? By whom?”

No easy way to say this. It was too bad Kirsten had to be there. “Diana.”

“Diana? My Diana?” Kirsten’s face was blank—a carefully controlled blank, with muscles bunching in their attempt to show no expression. Her medical telemetry told me that she was stung by Aaron’s use of the word “my.” “Can you contact her?” he asked.

“I’ve been trying since the moment she left, but there’s too much interference from our ramfield.” The elevator popped open, revealing one arm of the U-shaped hangar-deck control room. Aaron and Kirsten rounded the corner into the crosspiece of the U. Clustered around the instrumentation consoles were the dozen others I had summoned, mostly clad in pajamas and robes. Seated at the center of the group were tiny Gennady Gorlov, the mayor of Starcology Argo, looking about as disheveled as Aaron did, and giant I-Shin Chang, chief engineer, clad in one of those specially tailored denim jumpsuits he required to accommodate his four arms. Chang had been off working on his secret project, instead of sleeping, even though this was his normal sleep period.

Aaron peered out the observation window that ran along the inner walls of the control room, overlooking three sides of the hangar. His eyes fixed on the still-open space door. “Distance to Orpheus?”

“Fifty klicks,” said Chang in his staccato delivery. The engineer vacated the chair in front of the main console, its cushioned seat rising ten centimeters with a pneumatic hiss. He gestured with his lower left hand, not quite as beefy as its upper counterpart, for Aaron to take his place.

Aaron did so, then stabbed a finger at the central viewscreen, a glowing rectangle cutting the observation window into two long curving panes. “External!”

I produced a holographic rendering of Starcology Argo. The principal material part of our Bussard ramjet looked like a wide-mouthed bronze funnel. At this level of resolution, the great reticulum of field wires extending outward from the funnel was invisible. Girdling the inside of the funnel cone halfway down was the magnetic torus; girdling the outside at the same location was the windowless ring-shaped habitat, painted a sea green in color, its plated walls looking like a sheet-metal quilt. Most of the remainder of Argo’s three-kilometer length was a cylindrical silver shaft, interrupted here and there by gold and black tanks and compressors. At the end of the shaft was the tight cluster of cylindrical igniters, the bulbous, copper-colored fusion chamber, and the corrugated, flared fusion-shield assembly. In front of Argo, I added a tiny silver angle-bracket representing the runaway lander.

“Orpheus’s velocity?” asked Aaron.

“Sixty-three meters per second and slowing,” I said through the speaker on the console before him.

“She’s moving perpendicular to the ramfield’s magnetic lines of force, yes?” said Chang, the words coming out of him like machine-gun fire. “That’s dragging her down.”

“Will Orpheus collide with us?” asked Mayor Gorlov.

“No,” I said. “My autonomic meteor-avoidance system angles the ramfield away from us whenever a metallic object enters it. Otherwise, Orpheus would have hurled down the funnel and destroyed our ramjet.”

“We need that ship back,” said Gorlov.

“That ship?” Aaron swiveled his chair to face the little man. The underscoring squeak of its bearings made his exclamation sound shrill. “What about Di?”

The mayor was twenty centimeters shorter than Aaron, and massed only two-thirds what he did, but there was nothing tiny about Gorlov’s voice. I often had to run a convolution algorithm on it to clear out distortion. “Wake up, Rossman,” he bellowed. “It’s suicide to enter the ramfield.” Gorlov’s campaign had not been won on the basis of his gentle manners.

Kirsten laid a hand on Aaron’s shoulder, one of those nonverbal gestures that seemed to communicate so much for them. Her touch did have a slightly calming effect on his vital signs, although, as always, the change was difficult to measure. He squeaked back to face the viewer and scooped a calculator off an adjacent console, cupping it in his palm. I swiveled three of my lens assemblies to look at it, but none of them could make out what he was typing.

“Orpheus’s engines have stopped firing, yes?” asked Chang, his eyes looking up at the ceiling. Such an expression usually meant they were addressing me, although my CPU was actually eleven levels below and clear around on the other side of the habitat torus from where Chang happened to be standing. I’d once mistaken one of those uplifted-eyes questions as being asked of me, when really it was a spoken prayer. I’ve yet to see a more violent flurry of medical-telemetry changes than at the moment I began responding to the question.

“Yes,” I said to Chang. “All shipboard systems went dead when Orpheus entered the ramfield.”

“Is there any chance that we can pull her back in?” asked Gorlov, typically loud.

“No,” I said. “That’s impossible.”

“No, it’s not!” Aaron swung around, his chair squeaking like an injured mouse. “By God, we can bring her back!” He handed the calculator to Chang, who took it in his upper right hand. I zoomed in on its electroluminescent display, four lines of proportionally spaced sans-serif text. Damn him….

Chang looked dubiously at Aaron’s calculations. “I don’t know…”

“Dammit, Wall,” Aaron said to the big man. “What have we got to lose by trying?”

Chang’s telemetry, not so different from an average man’s despite his modifications, showed considerable activity as he studied the display some more. Finally: “JASON, angle the ramfield as Aaron has suggested, yes?” He held the calculator up to one of my pairs of eyes. “Constrict it as much as possible so as to deflect Orpheus into the shadow cast by the ramscoop funnel.”

All attention focused on my viewscreen display. I overlaid a graphic representation of the field lines in a cool cyan. As I tightened the field, its intensity increased. Orpheus slowed, caught in the net. Aaron brought his hand up to his shoulder, interlacing his fingers with Kirsten’s.

“Can you raise her yet?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“What about remote control?”

“Even if I could get a signal through, I wouldn’t be able to take control. The onslaught of incoming hydrogen ions will have scrambled Orpheus’s electronics.”

On screen, Orpheus started moving past the rim of the funnel, crossing it on the outside. Barely at first, then with more speed, then—

Aaron studied the monitor. “Now!” he snapped. “Switch the ramfield back to its normal orientation.”

I did so. The monitor showed the blue field lines dancing like a cat’s cradle being manipulated. Orpheus was no longer being pulled magnetically. Instead, it was simply hurtling toward us under its own inertia.

“Once she slips into the lee of the funnel,” Aaron said, “she’ll be shielded from the induced cosmic rays, and she’ll be out of the magnetic field. Orpheus’s systems should stabilize and you should be able to fire her engines at that point.”

“I’ll try my best,” I said.

Closer. Closer. The tiny angle-bracket rushed toward the ring-shaped habitat. It would smash through the sea-green hull in sixty-seven seconds.

“Here she comes!” bellowed Gorlov. Chang was wringing all four of his hands.

“Now, JASON!”

Closer. Closer still. The point of the boomerang was aimed directly at the hull, the swept-back wings rotating slowly around the lander’s axis, a slight spin having been induced by the magnetic field.

“Now!”

My radio beam touched Orpheus, and the lander obeyed my command. “Firing attitude-control jets,” I said. The partial pressure of C0₂ in the room rose perceptibly: everyone exhaling at once.

Gorlov and Chang wiped sweat from their brows; Aaron, as always, wore an expression that gave no insight into what he was feeling. He gestured out the observation window to the hangar deck below. “Now maneuver her back here.”

Even as he spoke, the boomerang-shaped lander, its silver hull now burnished to a dull reflectiveness, appeared through the open hangar door. It looked insignificant against the spectral backdrop of the glowing starbow.