Polaris

TWENTY-THREE

Association, in the early days of the Confederacy, when survival seemed problematic.) Terranova, the new Earth, was well named. It orbited a nondescript orange star, it had a twenty-one-degree axial tilt, its gravity was a fraction of a percent below standard; it had an oversized airless moon, and there were a pair of continents that, seen from orbit, resembled Africa and the Americas.

The most remarkable aspect of the planet was that terrestrial life-forms integrated easily with the biosystem. Tomatoes grew nicely. Cats chased the local equivalent of squirrels, and the temperate zones proved to be healthful places for human beings.

But the critical piece of information for us was that the Mangles had a system of satellites in place, and it had been up and running over a century. Nobody came or went without their knowledge, and it didn’t take long to find out there had been no activity during the target time period. The Polaris had not gone there.

The only noteworthy event during our visit to Terranova occurred when a piece of rock got too close and had to be taken out by the Hazard Control System. The HCS consists of a black box mounted on the hull that detects and identifies incoming objects and coordinates the response, which is delivered by one or more of four particle-beam projectors.

The rock at Terranova was strictly a one-beam operation. It was only the second time in my career that we actually used the device.

Serendipity was the fourth world in the Gaspar system, and our last candidate. It was effectively a collage of desert broken by occasional patches of jungle near the poles.

A few small seas were scattered across the surface, isolated from each other. The equatorial belt was boiling hot and bone-dry, its vegetation consisting mostly of purple scrub. Even the local wildlife avoided the area.

Gaspar was a yellow-white class-F star. According to the data banks, the three inner worlds were all pretty thoroughly cooked. The sun was in an expansion cycle, getting hotter every year, and would soon burn off whatever life still clung to Gaspar IV. Serendipity. Soon seemed to be one of those cosmic terms, which really meant several hundred thousand years.

The life-forms were big, primitive, hungry. Not dinosaurs, exactly. Not lizards at all. They were mostly oversized, warm-blooded, slow-moving behemoths. Their considerable bulk was favored by the low gravity, which was about three-quarters of a gee.

The world was called Serendipity because everything had gone wrong on the discovery flight. The ship had been the Kismet, a private vessel operated by fortune hunters functioning several decades before the Confederacy established guidelines for exploration. Like requiring a license before external life-forms could be introduced into a biosystem.

A field team member was killed by one of the behemoths. Walked on, according to the most popular version of the story. Another had stepped in a hole and broken his leg. A marriage had disintegrated into a near-violent squabble. And the captain suffered a fatal heart attack the day after they arrived. In the midst of all that, the Kismet ’s Armstrong engines died, so they had to be rescued.

From orbit, we looked down at a surface that was dust brown and wrinkled, dried out, cracked, broken. Lots of places were emitting steam. Serendipity had the usual big moon that seems to be a requirement for large, land-based animals, and its skies were almost cloudless. It had a breathable atmosphere, and there were no pathogens known to be dangerous to humans. If you wanted to hide someone for a few weeks or months, this would be the perfect place. Except where would a hotel key fit in? “I was hoping we’d get lucky,” said Alex.

“Doesn’t look like it. This place is primitive. Does anybody live here at all?”

He grinned. “Would you?”

“Not really.”

“We’re here,” he said. “Might as well do the search. I’d guess we’re looking for a cluster of modules. Some sort of temporary shelter. Anything artificial.” He was visibly discouraged.

I told Belle to run a planetwide scan.

We passed over a miniscule sea and back over desert. The place was so desolate and forlorn that it had a kind of eerie beauty. When we crossed the terminator and slipped into the night, the ground occasionally glowed with ethereal fire.

But there was nothing, no place, certainly no hotel, where anyone could have stashed visitors.

After two days, Belle reported the scan complete. “Negative results,” she said. “I do not see anything artificial on the surface.”

Alex grunted and closed his eyes. “No surprise.”

“Time to go home,” I said.

He took the key out of his pocket and stared at it. Up. Down. Lock. Unlock.

Transfer funds. “Barber was willing to kill to keep its existence secret,” he said.

Why?

I looked down at the surface and thought how nothing would ever happen there.

The oversized critters would continue to chase one another down while the climate kept getting hotter. By the time survival became impossible even for these hardy lifeforms, the human race would probably be gone, evolved into something else. It got me thinking about time, how it seems to move faster as you get older, how it runs at different rates in gravity fields or under acceleration. How we assume that the kind of world we live in is the status quo, the end point of history. There’ll always be a Rimway.

“You know,” I said, “we may have made an assumption about the key.”

An eyebrow went up. “Which is what?”

“That it came from around 1365.”

“Of course it did,” he said. “It was lying in the back of the shuttle.”

“That doesn’t mean it belongs to that era.” I took the key from him and stared at it. “People have been barging around in the Veiled Lady for thousands of years.”

“We’ve ruled out planetary surfaces and outstations,” Alex said. “And we’ve ruled out a rendezvous with another ship. What’s left?”

Not much. “Somebody else’s outstation?” I suggested.

He considered it. “Maybe. Maybe we’re looking for an artifact. Something left over that’s not in the record.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “But it can’t be too old. If you’re going to use it to shelter people, even for a just a few days, it has to be capable of functioning.”

“By which you mean it has to be able to hold a charge.”

“Yes. That’s part of it.”

“How old?” he asked.

When did I become the professional on outstations? “I’m not an engineer, Alex.

But I’d guess maybe two thousand years at the outside. Maybe not that long. Maybe not nearly that long.”

We were moving back into daylight again, watching the sun climb above the arc of the planet. “Two thousand years,” he said. “That sounds like the Kang.”

“It could be.” They’d been active in this region for a period of about twelve hundred years, beginning during the ninth millennium. After that they’d gone dormant. Only in the last century had the Kang begun showing some of their old vitality. “Belle,” I said, “has anyone other than ourselves and the Kang Republic been prominent in the exploration of the region that includes Delta Karpis? Out, say, to seventy light-years?”

“The Alterians maintained a substantial presence, as did the Ioni.”

“I’m talking about recent times. Within the last three millennia.” I realized what I’d said and must have grinned.

“That’s good,” Alex said. “We’re thinking big.”

“It appears,” Belle said, “that no one else has invested in the subject area. Other than the Commonwealth, of course.” The forerunner of the Confederacy.

Alex poked a finger at the AI. “Belle,” he said, “what kind of character did the Kang use to represent their currency? During their period of ascendancy?”

“There were many. Which currency, and during what era?”

“Show us all of them.”

The screen filled with symbols. Letters from various alphabets, ideographs, geometric figures. He looked at them, shook his head, and asked whether there were more. There were.

It was in the second batch. The fifth symbol from the key. The rectangle. The press pad. “That looks like it,” he said.

It was impossible to be certain, but it did seem to be the same character. And I thought, Finally! “Belle, please provide the position for any remnant outstation from the Kang era located within the subject area.”

“Scanning, Chase.”

Alex closed his eyes.

“We lack data,” said Belle. “The locations of the Kang outstations were lost during the Pandemic revolutions. The stations themselves were long abandoned by the time the polity collapsed, and apparently no one cared enough to save the details.

The locations of six are known, none of which is in the area of interest. But there were substantially more.”

“But we don’t know where they were located.”

“That is correct.”

Serendipity is only twelve light-years from the place where the dwarf plowed into Delta Kay. Had Delta Kay still been a living star, it would have been at almost a right angle to the plane of the local solar system, bright and yellow in Serendipity’s northern skies.

“Might as well go home,” said Alex.

Belle stepped onto the bridge, blond and beautiful and wearing a workout suit.

Her shirt said

. This one, whose programing was virtually identical to the original’s, enjoyed making personal appearances. She shook her head, signaling that she wished she could help.

It was out there somewhere, a forgotten station where the Polaris passengers had found refuge. But where? A sphere with a diameter of 120 light-years makes a pretty big search area. “Not so fast,” I said. “How did Maddy know it was there? If there is such a place, how’d they happen to find out about it?”

“I have no idea,” said Alex.

And I remembered Nancy White at the outstation, the fact of its existence borne away by the ages. “Given enough time,” she’d said, “it’s what happens to us all.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nancy White. She was especially interested in things that get abandoned.

Worlds, cities, philosophies. Outstations. ”

“She knew of one in this area?”

“I don’t know. She does a show that includes a tour of one of them. Chai Ping, or Pong, or something like that.” I looked at Belle.

“ Checking, ” Belle said. She leaned back against a bulkhead and let her gaze drop to the deck.

Alex wandered over to the viewport and looked down into the darkness. “I can’t imagine,” he said, “that we ever thought they might have come here.”

“Had to look, Alex. It was the only way to be sure.”

Belle lifted her eyes. “I’ve reviewed the show in question. White locates Chai Pong at a point eleven hundred light-years from Delta Karpis.”

Well out of range.

Alex grumbled something I couldn’t make out. The air felt thick and heavy.

“Maybe she found more than one.”

“It’s possible,” I said.

“If so, it might be in her work somewhere. In her commentaries, her essays, her notebooks. Maybe even in another of the shows.”

“Starting a comprehensive review,” said Belle. “This will take a few minutes.”

“Meantime,” said Alex, “there’s no point hanging around here.”

“Let’s sit tight,” I said, “until we know which way we’ll be going.”

Belle brightened and raised a fist in triumph. “It’s in her Daybook,” she said. “In a collection of ideas for essays and programs.”

“What does it say?” asked Alex.

“Are you familiar with Roman Hopkin?”

“No.”

“He’s a longtime friend of White’s. An historian who seems to have spent most of his time doing research for her. Anyhow, he discovered Chai Pong. In 1357.”

The Daybook appeared on-screen:

3/11/1364

Hopkin has found another. How many lost pieces of the Kang are out there? This one, he says, is near Baku Kon, in the dusty embrace, as he put it, of one of the gas giants in the system. (He always tends to overstate things.) He says it’s going down soon. Into the atmosphere. He thinks it’ll happen sometime during the next few centuries. It’s apparently been abandoned for two thousand years. He says it looks as if they cleared out in a hurry, and left everything. Ideal site for reclamation. It’s a microcosm of the Kang culture of the period. He’s going back in a month, and he promised I can go along.

I read it several times.

“Nancy White,” continued Belle, “is the only one of the Polaris passengers to do extensive off-world travel. She has, as you know, a reputation for a cosmic perspective. She is celebrated primarily because - ”

“Skip it, Belle. A Kang platform would have been a major discovery. Why didn’t we hear of it before?”

“Hopkin was dead three months later.”

“Another murder?” I asked.

“It doesn’t seem so. He died trying to rescue a woman who was attempting to commit suicide from a skyway. She climbed over the railing. He tried to stop her, but she apparently put up a fight and took him with her.”

“And Nancy White kept the second Kang discovery quiet,” I said.

“Belle,” said Alex, “where’s Baku Kon?”

A star map flashed onto one of the screens. Here was Delta Karpis. And there, at a range of forty-five light-years, a light blinked on and grew bright. “It would have been easy for them,” Alex said.

Belle caught his eye. “Alex,” she said, “I have a transmission for you. From Jacob.”

“From Jacob? Okay. Let’s see it.”

She put it on-screen:

Alex, I’ve received a message from one Cory Chalaba, who’s with the Evergreen Foundation. I take it you know her. She says the woman in the picture came by to look at the exhibit. She didn’t want to comment further except to ask me to relay the message and to get back to her. I assume you know what it means.”

Teri Barber.

Alex nodded. “She wants to know whether Barber might try to steal the artifact.”

“What are you going to tell her?” I asked.

“It should be safe enough. It’s been in that case for sixty years. Barber will realize that stealing it would only call attention to it. No, that’s not where the danger lies.”

“You’re talking about Baku Kon?”

“Yes, indeed. She’ll assume that we know. That we’ve figured it out.”

“And she’ll be waiting for us when we get there.”

He pushed back in his chair and folded his hands. “Wouldn’t you?”

Baku Kon was a class-B blue-white star, surface temperature twenty-eight thousand degrees Kelvin. The catalog indicated it was relatively young, only 200 million years old. Like Sol, it had nine planets. And, as if it had been designed by a mathematician, the gas giants were the inner- and outermost, and the third, fourth, and fifth.

The inner giant was in a marked elliptical orbit that would literally carry it through the sun’s atmosphere. The Kang weren’t going to put a station there.

Generally, when you were deciding the location of an outstation, you would want to be close enough to the sun to be able to take advantage of the free energy it supplies, but you don’t want to have to put up a ton of shielding to protect yourself from radiation.

“The third one,” I told Alex.

Finding an outstation after it’s been shut down is not an afternoon at the beach.

If it’s not lit up, if it’s not putting out a signal, you’ve no easy way to distinguish it from the thousands of other rocks that are usually orbiting a big world. So we had to start an elimination process. Pull in close to a candidate, look for antennas, dishes, collectors, whatever, cross it off the list, and move on to the next. You could be at it for a while. And we were. Days and nights began to run together.

Life on board settled into a routine. Alex spent a lot of time reading White’s work, hoping to find something that Belle might have missed. “She tells stories here,” he said, “like being with her father on Rimway when she was a girl, and both moons lined up during a total solar eclipse. It happens at sporadic times, sometimes not for thousands of years. But this was 1338, and it was going to happen again just fourteen years later. They talked about where each of them would be when it did, and she said she wanted to be with him, made him promise. But he died two years early, and she describes watching the event alone, or at least watching it without him.” He nodded and took a sip from a coffee cup.

“Hard to believe,” I said, “someone like that could be part of this.”

“It would take somebody like that,” he said.

We moved slowly through the field of orbiting rocks. They ranged in size from pebbles to moons twice the size of the big moon at home. The planets were recently formed, still in the process of clearing gas and assorted debris out of the neighborhood. Roman Hopkin had not been exaggerating when he described a dusty embrace. Belle did the examinations, of course, while we looked out the windows.

She was far more efficient than we would have been, checking out whole clusters of the things simultaneously. Had it been necessary for Alex and me to do it, we’d still be there.

It took just over a week.

Belle woke me in the middle of the night to say she had a hit. “ Ninety-nine percent probability,” she added. It was a big, misshapen asteroid, craggy, broken, its surface covered with ridges and craters. Communication, sensing, and collection equipment bristled from its higher ground. It had at least six attitude thrusters. We could even see where a section had been cut away to provide easier ingress to docking bays.

“Any sign of another ship?” I asked her.

“Negative, Chase.” She didn’t add, didn’t need to, that this area would be easy to hide in.

“Okay, Belle. I want you to position the ship one kilometer from the outstation.

Match course and speed with it.”

“Complying.”

Outstations are designed so that arriving ships find the docks wide open. You just glide in, tie up, exit through a boarding tube, and you’re inside. That’s all there is to it. The way we did at Meriwether.

But here we were looking at an asteroid that just hung there in the night. No doors had opened on our approach, no transmission informed us of the virtues of the Wong-Ti Restaurant, no lights came on.

It appeared to be in tidal lock, always showing the same face to the big planet.

The surface was a tangle of jagged rock and craters. I could see hatches scattered here and there. Most were designed to provide access to fields of sensors, antennas, telescopes, and/or collectors. That’s what you’d expect, of course. They were service hatches. I found what looked like a main access near the docking area. It would take us right into the concourse.

We’d need extra air tanks. And a laser. In case the airlocks weren’t working.

If Barber were there, she’d probably already been alerted that we’d arrived. So there was no reasonable chance of sneaking up on her at four in the morning. I decided to let Alex sleep, but I didn’t go back to my own cabin. If something happened, I wanted to be on the bridge.

When Alex appeared a few hours later, his first question was whether I’d seen any sign of Barber. No, I said, everything’s quiet.

“Good,” he said. “Maybe we’ll be okay.”

I showed him the hatch I thought we should use.

He frowned. “No.”

“Why not? It’s ideal.”

He indicated a service hatch buried among ridges in a remote antenna field.

“ That one,” he said.

“Alex, that’s a long way from the docks. If we go in there, it’s going to be a major hike into the operating spaces.”

“That’s exactly right.”

“So why are we using it?”

“Because if Barber’s here, she’ll think the same way you do. She’ll expect us to use the hatch by the docks.”

He had a point. “Okay,” I said. “But that’s rough country. I’m not excited about taking the ship in close to those ridges.”

“We’d have to jump, wouldn’t we?”

“Yes, we would.” Maybe twenty meters or so.

Unaccountably, he seemed to think that was good. “We’ll use the lander,” he said. “Or at least, I will.”

“What do you mean? We’re both going over, right?”

He delivered that familiar mischievous grin.