Infinity Beach

19

The Hammersmith passed into hyperspace at 12:41 A.M., Saturday, March 10. The plan was to go back outside the expanding bubble of radio signals. They would remain in the plane of the Alnitak system, but their new bearing on the giant star would be at right angles to the first one. They would be traveling roughly thirty light-years, and would arrive at their destination just after eight P.M.

They slept late. Kim woke up excited, anxious to get through the day, and to launch the second round of FAULS devices. But she could find nothing to occupy her, and ended by playing chess in the rec room with the AI, whom she set at a beginner’s level and proceeded to hammer.

Solly, with his inimitable sense of what was needed, put together another candlelight dinner. She drank a bit more than she should have, and she was a bit woozy when the Hammersmith returned to realspace.

This time, because the jump had been much shorter, they arrived closer to their ideal site, and within an hour they were listening again to the Hunter trying to open a conversation with its invisible companion. Shortly after the intercept had begun, however, they lost the signal. They were gratified to see it appear fourteen minutes later, precisely on schedule. That seemed to confirm the speculation that it was passing behind the gas giant.

They knew there’d be several hours of futile signaling by Hunter before Valiant responded. So they settled in, alternately reading and napping, and occasionally cavorting like adolescents. “This is the way star travel was meant to be,” Solly told her.

Four hours after the first signals, the four-count, had been sent, the Valiant had apparently responded. Hunter replied with thirteen blips. Emily and her shipmates appeared onscreen, and sent greetings. And showed their open door.

As before, there was no further transmission.

But they had their second bearing. They compensated for stellar movement in the interim, and the lines intersected at a point three hundred AUs from Alnitak. Right on the orbit of the gas giant.

They waited nevertheless through two more days. Finally, there could be no question that the show was over, and Solly put a disk into the recorder and directed the AI to copy the intercept record from both sites. When it was completed he gave it to Kim. “With luck,” he said. “It’ll keep us both out of court.”

“We’ll see.” She looked at the disk. “It might be easier for someone to argue the entire crew of the Hunter went over the edge rather than that they actually saw something. That might be stretched to account for the missing women, as well. What we really need is a glimpse of whatever it was they saw.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, I guess it’s time to go to phase two.”

“The scene of the crime?”

“Yep.”

“Why bother? What’s the point? They’re all long gone.”

“Solly,” she said, “put yourself in the place of the other ship. Look, for reasons we don’t understand, our people came back and didn’t say anything. Maybe there was a fight on board, a disagreement on how to handle the announcement, on who was going to get the credit—”

“—That doesn’t make sense—”

“Okay. But something happened. Maybe the experience scared them off. Maybe they saw something so terrifying it drove them all out of their minds—”

“—And we want to go there?—”

“We’ll be careful. And we won’t be taken by surprise. Look, the point is, both ships knew there’d been contact. It had to be as big an event for the celestials as it was for us. So what did they do afterward? What would you and I do?”

He propped his chin on one hand and gazed steadily at her. “Assuming no real conversation took place and the other ship just took off, we’d post a surveillance.”

“Can you see any possibility we wouldn’t do that? That we’d just ignore the incident?”

“No,” he said after a moment’s pause. “No, although we did ignore the incident. But I’d have expected we’d have put science teams out there right away.”

“And they’d have stayed for years, right?”

“I suppose. But twenty-seven years?”

“Well, maybe not that long. I don’t know. But we’d leave some automated systems in place.”

“Sure,” he said. “We’d establish a presence and keep it indefinitely.”

“Right. So all we have to do is show up at Alnitak and let whatever they’ve left behind get a look at us. We head for the gas giant and we do whatever we can to draw attention to ourselves. We look for anything that doesn’t belong there. And if we’re lucky, who knows what might show up?”

At three hundred AUs, the world was eight times farther out than Endgame was from Helios, or six times Pluto’s distance from Sol. It had seventeen satellites and a ring system divided into three sections. A permanent storm of the kind often associated with gas giants floated in its southern latitudes. It required roughly twenty-three centuries to complete an orbit around the central luminary, which even at this extreme distance, was fully a third as bright as Greenway’s noontime sun.

Solly set course toward the planet.

“The system,” said Kim, “has been surveyed once. That was a hit and run, in-and-out. They spent two days here. There are no really unusual features, unless you’re talking about the atmospherics.” She meant the vast interstellar clouds, cradles for new stars, turbulent and explosive, illuminated from within and also by Alnitak. The nearby nebula NGC2024, stretching for light-years across that restless sky, was a kaleidoscope of bright and dark lanes, of exquisite geometry, of glowing surfaces and interior fires. Enormous lightning bolts moved through it, but it was so far that they seemed frozen in place.

“Slow lightning,” said Solly. “Like the mission.”

Kim looked at the nebula. “How do you mean?”

“We’ve known for a long time that contact might eventually happen, maybe would have to happen, and that when it did it would change everything, our technology, our sense of who we are, our notions of what the universe is. We’ve seen this particular lightning strike coming and we’ve played with the idea of what it might mean for at least twelve hundred years. We’ve imagined that other intelligences exist, we’ve imagined them as fearsome and gentle, as impossibly strange and remarkably familiar, as godlike, as incapable, as indifferent. Well, I wonder whether the bolt is about to arrive. With you and me at the impact point.”

On the other side of the sky, a long luminous bar, IC434, stretched away into a glorious haze. Presiding over it was the great dark mass of the Horsehead Nebula.

“It’s a place for artists.” She stood by a window looking out at the vast display. The brilliant rings of the gas giant angled past her field of vision, a glowing bridge to its family of moons, all in their first quarter. She looked again at the blowup of Kane’s mural. It was impossible to know whether this world was the one in Emily’s hand. But she’d have bet on it.

There were two other suns in the system, one too remote to pick out, the other bright enough to provide reading light. The nearer was approximately 1300 AUs from Alnitak. It too was superluminous, though not in the same league with its companion. “People used to think a binary star couldn’t have a planetary system,” she told Solly. “We know better now, but the planets tend to get tossed around a lot, and often thrown out altogether. Especially when both components are massive and there isn’t a lot of space between them.” She eased herself into a chair and gazed steadily at the rings and moons. “It won’t stay in orbit long. It’s just a matter of time before something jerks it loose.”

The planetary disk had an autumnal coloration. The storm was a darker splotch, a circular piece of night. “About one and a half Jupiters,” he said, using the standard measurement for gas giant mass. “I’m beginning to understand why they decided this was the place to stop while Kane did his patchwork.”

“It is spectacular. I looked over the records of Tripley’s previous voyages,” said Kim. “He was here before. Wanted to see the Horsehead.”

Solly stared at the clouds and the world for long minutes, and then turned to her. “What do we do first?”

Good question. “We go into orbit. And then we wait.”

“Kim,” he said, “we were a little critical of Tripley for being unprepared to run a contact scenario. Are we ready? If something happens?”

She drew herself up in her professorial mode. “Be assured,” she said, “nothing will happen.” They both laughed. In fact, Kim had prepared a visual program to transmit in the event there was an encounter. It included pictures of the Valiant and the Hunter, of herself and Solly, of interiors of the Hammersmith. There were pictures of Greenway’s forests and oceans, of people lounging on beaches. There were anatomical charts of humans and several dozen animals and plants. And finally there was an image of three Valiants and three Hammersmiths silhouetted against the rings of the Jovian; and the Jovian itself followed by four hundred lines divided into tens. She showed it to Solly.

“We meet back here when the planet has turned on its axis four hundred times.”

“Good,” he said. A day on the gas giant lasted between seventeen and eighteen hours. So they were talking roughly one year. Enough time to outfit an expedition, work out their strategy, and return. “Kim,” he asked, “how do you want me to program, the sensors? What exactly are we looking for?”

“Set for maximum sweep and range. And we should look for anything that wouldn’t normally be out there. Processed metal. Plastic. Anything that isn’t gas, rock, or ice. Or anything that moves on its own.”

The original survey gave few details for the gas giant. Kim knew it had an equatorial diameter of 187,000 kilometers, and a polar diameter of 173,000 kilometers. Average density was only 1.2 times that of water, indicating a high proportion of the lighter elements, hydrogen and helium. Its axial tilt was 11.1 degrees.

Its most striking feature was the rings, which were coplanar with the equator. They had an overall diameter of 750,000 kilometers, and were divided into three distinct sets. The innermost reached down almost to the cloudtops. They were barely one kilometer thick, so when the Hammersmith passed them edge-on they all but vanished.

Two of the satellites were larger than Greenway; one minuscule worldlet at the outermost extremes of the system was only a half-dozen kilometers across. It orbited almost at right angles to the equator.

“It would help,” said Kim, “if we knew precisely where the incident took place.”

“How do you mean?”

“Altitude. Orbit, if possible.”

“Don’t see how we can determine that,” said Solly. “We can see the rings in one of the sequences, but the planet’s not visible at all.”

“But we know when everything happened,” said Kim. “We know now right to the minute.” Contact had been made February 17 at 11:42 A.M. shipboard time. “We have a picture of the rings during the event, and we have a starry background.”

“The stars would look the same from anywhere in the system,” he objected.

“The stars would,” she agreed.

But not the moons. And surely there was at least one moon in the picture.

There were two.

They ran the sequence again. Hunter floating against the midnight sky, the cargo door opening and lights coming on, splashing out into the void. How warm and inviting the interior looked, Kim thought, especially when Yoshi’s smiling image appeared and invited entry. There was something almost blatantly sexual in all that, and she wondered what the celestials had made of it.

They surveyed the satellite system until they had its mechanics down. Once they’d accomplished that, they ran the orbits backward to 4:12 P.M., February 17, the moment that the open door image had been transmitted. They matched the positions of the moons against the angle of the rings.

“Okay.” Solly put a graphic on one of the auxiliary monitors. “In order for everything to appear as it does in the picture, the Hunter would have had to be here.” He showed her the point, eleven degrees north of the equatorial plane, at an altitude of 45,000 kilometers. “But we only have a couple of minutes on the image, and it’s not enough to track a complete orbit.”

“We’ve got a second picture,” Kim reminded him. The Emily image, which had been taken two hours later.

Solly brought it up, found more moons, three this time, repeated the process, and smiled triumphantly. “I think we’re in business,” he said.

She was delighted. “Good. Let’s get ourselves into the same orbit. But I want to move a bit faster than the Hunter would have.”

“Why?”

“So that we’ll overtake anything that might be traveling at Hunter’s velocity.”

Solly frowned.

“Just do it, okay?” she said.

“Okay, Kim.”

“And let’s do as thorough a search as we can.”

“What exactly do you expect to find?”

“I expect nothing,” she said, feeling like Veronica King, who always said that. “But the possibilities are limitless.” The hope that she entertained, that she did not want to describe, was that the celestial was still here somewhere, a derelict. It was possible.

Solly passed instructions to the AI. “We’ll be going into orbit,” he told her, “later this evening. And we’ll need roughly twelve hours to do a complete search along the orbit.”

There was something in Solly’s voice. “Anything wrong?” she asked.

“I thought about this before we left but it didn’t really seem like something I wanted to bring up at the time.”

“Tell me, Solly.”

“We’re not armed,” he said. “Has it occurred to you that if this thing is here, it may not be friendly?”

“I don’t think that’s likely.”

“Why not?”

She looked out at the star-clouds. “Solly, even if they were an aggressive species, there wouldn’t be any point shooting at someone in a wasteland like this. What’s to gain?”

“Maybe they just don’t like strangers. Something happened to the Hunter”

“We have to assume they’re rational, Solly. Otherwise they couldn’t have gotten here in the first place.” She enjoyed being with him, alone in all this vast emptiness. It was different now that they could look out the windows and know that what they were seeing was really there. “They didn’t shoot at the Hunter. Or if they did, they’re not very dangerous because the Hunter got home safely.”

“It’s possible,” said Solly, “they’re at war against their own kind. Maybe Ben Tripley got the name right, calling it the Valiant. It could have been a warship.”

“Solly,” she said patiently, “they got home all right.”

“Did they? Who knows? Maybe they were taken. Maybe something else went back.” He made a scary face and hummed a few notes from the old horror series Midnight Express. She laughed. But a chill ran through her nevertheless.

Shortly after dinner they settled into Hunter’s orbit, which was roughly equatorial, varying only a few degrees above and below the line.

The rings dominated the sky, a vast shining arch beneath which the copper-gold clouds rolled on forever. Lightning bolts cruised through the depths and occasionally they saw the fiery streak of a meteor.

It seemed a place of infinite serenity and beauty. One might almost conclude it had been designed specifically to please the human eye and mind.

It was, she thought, a reason in itself to pursue starflight. Even if we were truly alone the mere existence of this kind of world and its magnificent star-clouds should be enough to summon the race from its ancestral home. There was something decadent in what was happening now, in the general retreat back to comfort and routine and familiar surroundings. In the lack of interest in all the things that had once been counted as noble and worth accomplishing.

We had begun to lead virtual lives.

No one had to work, so few did anything more than pursue quiet leisure. Kim had always thought herself ambitious. Yet during her entire life she had never felt an urge, even when the opportunity was there, to move beyond the home worlds. People complained about long weeks locked up in spartan accommodations, at getting ill during the jumps, at the expense of interstellar travel. And they settled for imaginary images, lovely little technological fireworks displays, created in the warm comfort of their living rooms. Throw a log on the fire and visit Betelgeuse.

She started to explain to Solly how she felt, looking at the star-cradles glowing in their windows, at the Horsehead, at the rings. The presence of another intelligence seemed not quite as important as it had a few hours before.

“Welcome to the club, Kim,” he said when she’d finished. “Those of us who make a living out here have known that for years. It really doesn’t matter all that much whether there are celestials in Orion. There’s just too much to see to complain about the details. And if it does turn out that we’re the only part of the universe able to see what’s around us, that’s okay.”

She’d always felt that Solly tended to neglect the more intellectual aspects of life. He didn’t read as much as he should, and he’d seemed to be too interested in the practical and the mundane, a man who seldom considered the philosophical issues. He’d surprised her several times on this trip, particularly with his remarks about the slow lightning. Ask Solly what the purpose of existence was, and he could be expected to reply that it’s a good lunch with good friends. Or a good woman.

She’d had a confused notion that life had something to do with expanding one’s intellectual horizons. And with achievement. Now she looked out the window and decided that whatever her purpose was, she’d fulfilled it when she arrived here.

And if she could choose a place to meet another intelligence, this would surely be it.

Below her, the upper atmosphere caught the light from the distant sun. It looked warm down there, and it was easy to imagine broad oceans and continents lying beneath those shimmering mists. In fact the temperature at the cloudtops was a terrestrial -17° C, the heat generated internally. Not all that bad if you could breathe hydrogen and methane.

Solly concentrated the scanners along the arc of the orbit, but he maintained a full search bubble out to more than six thousand kilometers. That took about 30 percent off the range and definition of the main search, but it was a price he was prepared to pay to avoid being surprised. Kim didn’t argue the point.

They were circling the planet every hour and twenty-two minutes. It had gotten late but no one showed any inclination to retire.

During the third orbit the alarm went off.

“Organic object ahead,” said the AI.

They went to the pilot’s room and Solly put the hit onscreen and went to full mag. They were on the dark side of the planet, in shadow, and consequently he could get nothing more than a marker. But the analysis had already begun.

Calcium.

“Object is rectangular, approximately two meters long, less than a meter wide.”

Carbon.

Range was twelve hundred kilometers.

Solly relaxed a bit. He laid in an intercept course. Kim felt the engines come on. The ship began to accelerate.

Potassium.

Below, the great arc of the rings was mostly in shadow, but a couple of moons gave them some light.

Hydrochloride.

Ahead, the sun was coming up. That wasn’t going to help visibility either.

“Won’t take long,” he said.

Kim felt a darkness gathering at the pit of her stomach.

They sat silently, sufficiently chilled that Solly raised the temperature on the flight deck.

Nine hundred kilometers and closing.

They flew into the sunrise.

Sodium.

The marker seemed to change its aspect, growing alternately brighter and dimmer. “It’s tumbling,” Solly said.

They raced toward the sun, passed under it, eventually got it behind them and were able to get a clear visual.

It was a body.

She was barely breathing now, gripping the arms of the chair, conscious of Solly watching her.

“You all right, Kim?”

Six hundred kilometers.

It wore a dark blue jumpsuit with a shoulder patch. She couldn’t make out details of the patch, but she knew what it said. PERSISTENCE.

Kim watched the body tumble down its lonely orbit.

Emily.

By the time they caught her, they were on the dark side again. Solly instructed the AI that they would take her on board through the cargo lock. Then he turned to Kim. “You sure you’re—?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m okay.”

He nodded. “Stay here. If anything unexpected happens while I’m gone—”

“What do you mean unexpected?”

“If we get jumped—”

“Oh.”

“Don’t hesitate to tell Ham to get us out of here.”

“It’ll obey me?”

“Sure.”

“Solly, be careful.”

“Count on it.”

“You’re not going outside, are you?”

“No farther than I have to.” He switched on the cargo hold imager so she could watch the recovery. Then he held her for a moment and went downstairs. Several minutes later he walked into the cargo bay, wearing a pressure suit and a jetpack, and waved at her.

“Kim,” came his voice, “can you hear me?”

“I hear you, Solly.”

“I’m in the process of decompressing the hold. As soon as we’re ready, we’ll open up.” He was standing in front of the cargo door, which was half again as high as he was, and about six meters wide.

“What do you need me to do?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’ll handle it from here.”

“What about if you fall out?” She wasn’t entirely joking.

“Can’t fall out,” he said. “I’m tethered.”

The engines slowed. Instead of a steady pulse, Hammersmith was now modulating its approach with occasional bursts from its turning thrusters.

The object came within range of their lights and she got a good visual. It was Emily, without question.

“I just don’t believe this,” Solly said. “Why in God’s name would they leave her out here?”

“Because they didn’t want to have to explain how she died.” Kim’s blood began to race. The sons of bitches had killed her after all.

Why?

The corpse drifted to within a hundred meters. Kim watched through the external imagers as the cargo door opened. She saw Solly framed in the light, silhouetted against the Jovian’s rings.

The thrusters kicked in again. Hammersmith rolled slightly, and slowed almost to a matching velocity with the body. It passed out of the forward view and appeared off to port.

“You okay, Solly?”

“Yeah. I’m fine. I’ll have her in a minute.”

She watched him lean out the open door. A moment later he hauled the body inside, laid it gently on the deck, placing it so it was out of the view of the imagers.

“Let me see her,” said Kim.

“You don’t want to,” he said.

But she insisted and Solly moved her.

The body had withered and caved it on itself. Yet the uniform was sharply pressed. She wore black grip shoes and white ceremonial gloves.

Her black hair still framed her face, which even in its mummified condition registered bewilderment and shock. Death, Kim thought, had come on her suddenly and unaware.

“Kim,” said the AI, “I have movement. At nine hundred kilometers.”

“What kind of movement?”

“Non-orbital.”

“Coming our way?” Her hopes soared. Not unmixed with a dash of apprehension.

“Yes. It is closing at almost one kps.”

“Close the door and repressurize, Ham. Solly, you hear that?”

“Yes, I did. Ham, is it on an intercept course?”

“I would describe it as a collision course, Solly.”

“Is it slowing down? Maintaining speed?”

“It is accelerating.”

“Okay. Prepare to leave orbit.”

“Wait a minute,” said Kim. “We don’t know that it’s hostile.”

“It’s sure as hell behaving that way. If they want to talk to us they can get on the radio.”

“Solly, for God’s sake, this is why we came. If somebody’s out there and we run for home, what good will it all have been?”

“Kim, trust me. It’s coming after us.”

He was right. She knew he was right, and it filled her with fury. What kind of stupidity was she facing?

Run.

“Ham,” she said, “can you put the object onscreen?”

“Negative, Kim. It’s too far away. But I can tell you it has no identifiable propulsion system.”

Kim jabbed a fist in the air. “You hear that, Solly? No tubes. It’s the same technology. The Valiant is the real thing.”

“I hear it, Kim. You’ve been right all along. But it’s still dangerous. Ham, are we ready to move out yet?”

“In fifteen seconds.”

“Come on, Solly. Think what you’re doing.”

“I am thinking.”

“Look how small it is.”

“That’s what bothers me, Kim. Mines are small. Nukes are small. Ships with friendly celestials are not small.”

“Solly—”

“Trust me. I’d like to make this work the way you want it to. But we don’t want to get killed over it. Ham—?”

“Ready, Solly.”

“Take us out of here. Accelerate at two gees for the moment. Take best course away from the object.” And to Kim: “If that thing’s directed by a friendly intelligence, it’ll recognize we’re scared, and it’ll pull off. If it continues to charge, that’ll tell us everything we need to know.” He opened one of the cargo containers, put the body inside, and secured it.

“They might not think the way we do,” she objected.

“Nobody friendly would launch something without trying to talk to us first. Ham, are we getting any kind of radio traffic?”

“No, Solly.”

“Put me on the multichannel,” Kim said. Solly threw her a pitying look. “It might be a misunderstanding of some sort,” she added.

Solly sighed loudly enough for her to hear. “I’m lost out here with a mad scientist,” he said.

She spoke into her throat mike: “Hello. This is Kim Brandywine on the Hammersmith. We come in peace.”

Static.

“Is anybody out there?”

“Just us goblins,” said Solly. “My guess is that the whole operation is automatic. You fly in, trigger the alarm, they shoot.”

“That couldn’t be. It’s stupid.”

“Maybe it is, but I’ll bet you that’s what’s happening. I’d say these people are a pretty ugly bunch.”

Kim tried several more times before giving up. “Where’s the object now?” she asked Ham.

“Closing fast. Range sixteen hundred kay.”

Solly waited impatiently, trapped in the hold while it repressurized.

“Solly,” she said, “Why don’t we take a chance here?”

“Kim, they are hostiles. What does it take? We’d better admit the reality.” A bell dinged and he pulled off his helmet and hurried out of camera range. “Ham,” he said, “what else can you tell us about this thing?”

“Its casing deflects sensors, Solly. Regrettably, I can offer little additional data. I can report, however, that it has adjusted course and velocity and continues to gain on us, although it is now doing so at a constant rate. It is still on a collision course.”

Kim listened with growing dismay. The thing had all the appearance of a missile. How could they be so goddamn dumb? Like everything else in this business, it made no sense.

Solly came into the room, sat down, and buckled in. “Exciting, huh?” he said.

“I guess I was wrong.”

“I guess so.” He looked up at the image of the pursuer on the overhead. “Okay, Ham, let’s rev it up. Go full ahead.”

The Hammersmith leaped forward.

“How long until we can make the jump?” asked Solly.

“Twenty-one minutes, ten seconds. Object is still closing.”

Estimated time to intercept blinked in the right-hand corner: 17:40. “We can’t do it,” she said. “We might as well turn around and try to talk to them.”

“Talk to a torpedo?”

She tried to think. “Don’t we have any defensive systems at all?”

“We could go outside and hit it with a stick.” Solly looked unhappy. “I wish it were burning fuel.”

“Why?”

“It’s small. It would run out quickly. What kind of power plant does it have?”

“I can speculate,” said Kim.

“Go ahead.”

“Magnetic force lines is one possibility. Antimatter’s another. Maybe quantum cells.”

“How do they move without thrusters?”

“Maybe they’re using the same kind of technology we use to produce artificial gravity. Except in their case, the field forms outside the vehicle. In whatever direction they want it to go. So they just fall into it.”

“In either event,” said Solly, “they’re going to have long-range capability.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Certainly. But they might not be able to keep up with us. Keep pouring on the coal.”

“You’re more optimistic than I am. The damn thing’s at seven hundred kay, currently closing at forty-eight per minute. That closure rate’s been a constant regardless of our acceleration.”

“How about maneuvering?”

“We can try that when it gets closer.”

The object was close enough now to have acquired definition. It had hyperbolic lines. In fact, it looked like a flying saddle. It even had a horn and side panels that resembled stirrups. Ham drew bar scales to show its size: thirty centimeters long, half as wide. Four centimeters thick. It was smaller than a saddle. The exterior was a smooth gray shell, save for a row of black lenses set along the side of the seat. It was white, and she could detect no markings. “It doesn’t look like a bomb,” she said.

“Glad to hear it.”

“Can we make a run for the rings? Maybe hide behind something?”

“We’re too far away. But I’ll tell you what we can do.”

“Yes?”

“Send a subspace transmission to St. Johns. Copy to Matt. Tell them what we found and what’s happening.”

“I’m not sure I want to tell the world what we’re doing.”

“Why?”

“Because we lose control of the discovery if we do that.”

Solly looked at her. “I’m beginning to understand what might have happened to the Hunter.”

“If we get chased off, go back with nothing, somebody else will be out very quick. I’ll tell you what, Solly. Let’s prepare the package, compress it, and have it ready to go. If it looks as if the worst is going to happen, we’ll send it. Okay?”

He agreed and she instructed Ham what was to be done, what the message would say. It was to include a description of everything they’d done so far, especially the discovery of Emily’s body, and would recommend that anyone else coming to Alnitak be equipped with defensive systems.

When she’d finished, Solly attached visuals of the object and Ham squeezed everything into a hypercomm transmission that would require less than a second to go out.

Kim had meanwhile been watching the images on the navigation screen. The object continued to close.

“Five minutes to intercept,” said Ham.

“Maybe it’s a heatseeker,” she said. “How about cutting the engines?”

He shook his head. “Our first sighting was at nine hundred kilometers. That’s too far out for a heatseeker. Anyway that would be pretty primitive stuff for somebody who doesn’t need reaction mass. No, this thing has a visual lock on us. Best we keep running.”

They had two clocks posted, one keeping track of time to intercept, and the other, about three minutes behind, the time till jump capability came on line.

“We could try the lander,” she said.

“Abandon ship?” He looked at her. “If we do that, the best we can hope for is to spend the rest of our lives here.”

“Why in God’s name,” demanded Kim, “would they do this? The damned thing can’t be all that dumb.”

“Don’t know,” said Solly. “I’m not up on my celestial psychology.”

Time to intercept clicked inside two minutes.

“Ham, on my command, we’ll execute a thirty-degree rum, mark fifteen, to port.”

“Solly, at this acceleration, you and your passenger will be subject to extreme stress and possibly even a degree of hazard.”

“Thank you, Ham. I appreciate your concern.”

“I am always concerned for the welfare of crew and passengers.”

The object was fifty kilometers out. One minute away. Solly watched the clock tick down to a final ten seconds. “Ham,” he said. “Execute.”

The Hammersmith rolled hard left and the nose lifted sharply. Kim was thrown to her right. Her organs jammed against one another while the seat shoved up against her. Her heart hammered and her vision got dark and she was afraid she’d black out. The rumble of power in the walls increased, and she tried to concentrate on the blip.

“It went by us,” Solly said. And then he looked at her. “You don’t look well.”

“I’m doing fine,” she said.

“Object has commenced to turn,” announced Ham.

Kim sat with her eyes closed. For the moment she almost didn’t care.

“We bought a minute or so,” said Solly.

She shook off her stupor.

“Still closing.”

Its image dominated the overhead. It was a preposterous object. Goddamn silly saddle.

“Coming up the tailpipe,” said Solly.

And then Ham: “Sir, it is decelerating. Moving to port.”

It slipped off the screen, appeared again moments later as one of the other imagers picked it up.

“The object is running on a parallel course. Still decelerating.”

“Hard right, Ham.”

This time it stayed with them.

“Maybe it’s not hostile after all,” said Kim. “It could have blown our rear end off if it wanted.”

“Maybe.”

The range finder put it four meters off the port side.

Four.

“It has matched course and speed,” said Ham.

The jump status indicator signaled they’d be ready in two minutes to go into hyperspace. “Hold off, Solly,” Kim said. “Give them a chance.”

“You have a suicide complex, sweetie. But we’ll play your game.”

“Object at two meters,” said Ham.

They watched its image growing larger. Then it was offscreen.

“Where’d it go?” asked Kim, after a long, damp silence.

“It’s in close. The sensors aren’t picking it up.”

“Object,” said Ham, “has attached itself to us.”

They sat without moving, without talking, without breathing.

Kim gripped the arms of her chair, thinking how you really couldn’t predict what a celestial might do. “What happens if we make the jump now?” she asked, in a voice so low that Solly had had to lean forward to hear her.

“Hard to say.” He also was whispering. “We might get rid of it. Or it might come with us.”

Kim’s pulse was in her throat. “You still think it’s a bomb?”

“What else could it be?”

“Jump status achieved,” said the AI.

“Hell,” said Kim, “let’s go.”

Solly didn’t need to be persuaded. “Where?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Greenway? Or Tigris?”

“Solly, this is probably not the best time for a discussion group.”

“Your call.”

“Greenway,” she said.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Solly looked momentarily thoughtful and then directed the AI to take them home.

The jump engines took over and the lights dimmed. Then the screens were blank, Alnitak was gone, the ringed world was gone, the star-clouds were gone.

“Jump successfully completed,” said Ham.

“The object?”

“It’s still there.”