Spinneret

Prologue

His only regret, Captain Carl Stewart thought as he stood on the bridge of America's first starship, was that there was no bottle of champagne available to smash against the U.S.S. Aurora's side.

The ceremony would have been impractical, of course, even if the State Department had cleared it. In the airless cold of space, the bottle would have required special preparation to keep it from either freezing solid or exploding prematurely, and that kind of reinforcement might easily have kept it from breaking properly and on cue. With the launching ceremony being beamed live to the entire planet—and the 2016 elections barely ten months away—no one wanted to risk that kind of fiasco. Still, the sea and its traditions ran four generations deep in Stewart's blood, and it seemed wrong somehow to leave home without a proper christening.

The drone from the TV monitor stopped. Stewart brought his attention back to the screen in time to see President Allerton lay a hand on the switch by his podium.

"Stand ready," he ordered, watching the image. An unnecessary command; the Aurora's crew had been ready for hours.

"… and with all of our hopes, prayers, and dreams riding with you, we send you forth to search out the new frontier; to find new worlds, new opportunities, new solutions; to reinvigorate and challenge the human race again to greatness.

Godspeed, Aurora." With a final flourish heavenward, Allerton threw the switch—

And five thousand kilometers above him, the spotlights attached to the workframe scaffolding blazed with light, providing the TV cameras with their first clear view of the Aurora.

Stewart gave the dramatic moment a count of five, and then nodded to his helmsman. "Ease her out, Mr. Bailey," he ordered. "Mind you don't wing the Pathfinder on the way."

Bailey grinned. "Aye, sir," he said. Slowly, moving on its cold-nitrogen docking jets, the Aurora left the workframe's snug confines. It passed well clear of the Pathfinder's work-frame—Stewart noticed peripherally their nearly completed sister ship flashing its running lights in salute—and drifted off toward the barely visible horizon of the dark world rolling beneath them. "Lot of lights showing down there," Reger, the navigator, commented.

"Lot of people down there to use them," Stewart grunted. And the scientists with their fancy telescopes and theories had better be right, he added silently to himself; there had better be more planets out there for the Aurora to find.

"Clear for shift," Bailey announced, looking over at Stewart. "Course vector less than five-second deviation."

"Acknowledged," Stewart nodded, putting his fears for Earth's survival out of his mind. "Make it good for the cameras, Mr. Bailey: shift!"

And with a flash of sheet-lightning discharge through every viewport and vision sensor, the stars vanished into the absolute black of hyperspace. Next stop, Alpha Centauri.

Mankind was on its way.

"It certainly has every reason to be Earthlike," astrophysicist Hashimoto commented, his stubby fingers dancing lithely over the readout screen. "Position should give reasonable temperature, size is within a few percent of Earth's, and we're getting a strong oxygen reading even at this distance."

Stewart nodded, refusing to get his hopes up too high. In the six systems Aurora had so far visited, there'd already been one false alarm. "We'll continue on course; that should get us close enough for better readings. If a landing seems warranted—"

"Captain!" Bailey barked, his voice tight and a half octave above normal.

"Something on the screen—moving fast!"

Stewart spun around in his chair … and froze. Coming out from behind the crescent of their target planet was a slowly moving star. Seconds later it was joined by a second … and a third.

Spacecraft!

"I'll be damned," Hashimoto gasped.

Stewart found his tongue. "Shift, Bailey. To hell with alignment—we can get back on course later."

"Wait a second," Hashimoto said—but with a flash the planet and moving stars vanished. "Captain!"

"As you were, Mr. Hashimoto," Stewart snapped, leaning on the title to remind the scientist of his temporary military position. "My orders are explicit on this point: in case of contact with nonhumans, I am to run if at all possible."

"But an alien race." Hashimoto was clearly in no mood to back down. "Think of the opportunities, the—"

"The Aurora is equipped for neither battle nor negotiation," Stewart interrupted him. "The diplomats can follow us once we've made our report; I hardly think the aliens will disappear in the next two months. I suggest you start analyzing the data we picked up and see if you can figure out just how Earthlike that planet really was. We'll want to know how interested the aliens are likely to be in our real estate before we make contact again."

Hashimoto's glare slipped into a thoughtful grimace; nodding, he left the bridge.

Stewart turned back to the gentle light of the displays, silently mouthing a word he'd once heard a Marine drill sergeant use. So life did exist out here … and if it existed so close to Sol, it must be pretty common, to boot. Perhaps a whole interstellar federation was sitting virtually on mankind's doorstep)—a cosmic club whose members could finally give humanity the answers it so desperately needed.

It wasn't until much later that the other possible consequence of the "cosmic club" occurred to him.

The hiss of the landing jets died into a ringing silence in Captain Lawrence Radford's ears. Popping the release on his harness, he carefully rose to his feet, feeling awkward after three weeks of the Pathfinder's zero-gee. "Start prelaunch check," he ordered the shuttle's pilot. "And get the atmosphere tester going, too."

"Yes, sir."

Stepping around his chair, Radford made his way to the airlock door, where the rest of the landing party was assembling. "Looks beautiful, Captain," Lieutenant Sherman smiled, reaching up to fasten Radford's helmet to his suit neck. "With all that green out there, it has to be running on chlorophyll."

"We'll find out soon enough." Carefully, refusing to rush, Radford completed his pre-EVA suit check. Then, giving the rest of the team a thumbs-up gesture, he stepped into the airlock. A ninety-second eternity later, the outer door snicked open … and Captain Radford of the U.S.S. Pathfinder stepped out onto mankind's first colony world.

He'd thought a lot about this moment, and he was ready. "In the name of—" He stopped short, the words dying in his throat.

"Captain?" Sherman's voice asked tentatively.

"All outside cameras on," Radford ordered quietly, wondering if the words would be audible over the thunder of his heart. The alien who had risen from the waisthigh grass fifteen meters away was holding an oddly shaped metal device … and if it wasn't pointed directly at Radford, it wasn't off by very much.

"Uh-oh," someone muttered. "Captain—we're surrounded."

"Acknowledged," Radford said. "Kyle, are you getting all this?"

"Perfectly," the clipped voice of the Pathfinder's first officer said. "We're on full alert; no sign of spacecraft up here."

"Yet," Radford said tensely. The aliens—he could see four more, now, in backup array behind the first one—were definitely wearing clothing of some sort, and the devices they held were identical enough to have been mass produced. No primitives, these—and the fact that the Pathfinder had spotted no traces of widespread civilization from orbit strongly suggested the aliens were themselves visitors here. "All right. I'm going to try backing into the airlock. We'll lift as soon as I'm aboard. Kyle, get the ship ready to shift."

"We'll be ready by the time you're back."

"Make sure you're ready before that," Radford said, "because if any alien spacecraft appear, you're to take off immediately. We're expendable; the information you've got isn't."

"Yes, sir." Kyle didn't sound very happy with the situation.

Radford wasn't especially thrilled with it either, but as it happened, the necessity for heroic self-sacrifice never arose. The aliens watched impassively as Radford eased back through the door; the shuttle regained orbit without anything like fighter aircraft appearing; and all screens were still clear as the Pathfinder shifted into hyperspace.

"Damn rotten luck," Kyle growled as they reviewed the films of the aliens later.

"The place was absolutely perfect."

"We don't know that for sure," Radford reminded him. "Anyway, finding out man isn't alone in the universe is at least as important as finding new planets to colonize."

"If they're friendly, you mean."

"If they're not, at least they don't know where we came from." Radford touched the rewind control. "Cheer up, Kyle— chances are good we'll find something else before we head home. And even if we don't, either the Aurora or the Celeritas is almost certain to."

"Maybe."

"Beautiful." Mario Civardi smiled at the planet centered in the telescope display.

"Simply beautiful."

Captain Curt Korczak suppressed his own smile at the Italian's exuberance, which echoed his own, more private feelings. The European Space Agency had taken a lot of knocks for the delays that had enabled the Americans to launch their two ships first; but the Celeritas had just paid back the skeptics, with interest. A brandnew world, where mankind could start over again with a clean slate. No pollution, no acid rain, no overpopulation, no nationalistic posturing. It was almost like getting into Eden again.

"Captain!" the man at the radar shouted suddenly. "Something approaching from astern—"

The main vision screen flashed with light as something with a fiery tail shot over the Celeritas and vanished far ahead. "What the hell!" First Officer Blake gasped.

"That was a bloody missile."

"Backtrack it," Korczak snapped. "I want to know where it came from."

"Got it, sir. Bearing down on us from—"

The chair slammed hard into Korczak's spine and a dull roar rattled his teeth.

"Shift, Civardi!" he managed. "Get us out of here!"

And, for a miracle, the equipment worked. Safe in the blackness of hyperspace, the Celeritas limped toward home.

"I don't believe it." President John Kennedy Allerton shook his head, laying down the report. "Fifteen reasonably Earthlike worlds, and every one already occupied?"

General James Klein shrugged. "I agree it's pretty hard to swallow, but the Pathfinder's films can't be argued with." He hesitated. "I've also heard that the ESA's Celeritas showed signs of damage when it got back early this morning, so I'd guess they ran into them, too."

Allerton pursed his lips tightly. "If that's true we'll want an immediate meeting to compare notes. Probably better bring the Soviets and Chinese in on it, too. An alien race hemming us in on all sides isn't something we can afford to play politics with. I suppose we should tell the UN, too."

Admiral Davis Hamill snorted. "The Russians won't believe a word of it, at least not until they get their own firsthand data, and Chinese security is so lax these days that if we tell them, we might as well broadcast it to the Islamic Confederation and the Africans. I can just hear what they'd say."

Allerton smiled faintly. "You take the tirades at the UN too seriously, Dave. The Third World may think we're the cause of all their problems, but there's really no way they can blame Project Homestead's failure on us."

"They can blame us for alerting the aliens that we're here, though," Klein pointed out.

"Oh, come on—they surely already know we're here. They surround us, for heaven's sake. If they wanted to fight they would've moved in years ago."

"What about the Celeritas"?" Klein objected.

"What about the Pathfinder! The aliens let them go."

Klein's rejoinder was lost in the simultaneous buzz of all three men's phones.

Twisting his wrist to point the directional speaker at his face, Allerton clicked the switch. "Allerton."

"Situation room," a tense voice answered. "Sir, we've picked up a flash of light from a point near Mars orbit. We think it's a star ship … except that the flash was red, not blue-white."

Allerton looked up to meet Klein's and Hamill's hardening expressions. The shift flash represented wasted energy … and the lower-energy red burst meant the newcomer had a drive far more advanced than anything on Earth. "Full military alert," the President ordered quietly. "Worldwide. Prepare for possible invasion.

I'll be down there shortly to take charge." He signed off. The two military men, still talking into their own phones, were already heading for the door. Thumbing the White House operator, Allerton got to his feet and followed. "Get me the Kremlin, Chinese Premier Sing, and UN Secretary-General Saleh—conference call, scramble, and rush it."

The long star ship drifted delicately into high Earth orbit shortly afterward, stifling the Soviets' official disbelief and touching off near-panic all across the globe. But the end of the world didn't come on the anticipated schedule. Instead, the alien briefly blanketed the airline radio frequencies with a message, in passable English, requesting a conversation with Earth's leadership.

Considering the norm of international politics, the response to that call was remarkably swift.

" … We welcome you on behalf of the Security Council, the United Nations, and the entire Earth. We look forward to the mutual exchange of knowledge and culture, and to a growth of true friendship between our peoples."

Secretary-General Hammad Ali Saleh sat down in his chair at the head of the semicircular table and reached thankfully for the water glass at his elbow. He hadn't been this nervous in thirty-five years, not since the Iran-Iraq border wars of the eighties. Then, he'd been a young Yemeni volunteer recognizing on an emotional level that the shells dropping out of the sky could kill him very dead.

Now, his position was uncomfortably similar. No one knew why the alien wanted to talk to mankind's leaders, but the Celeritas's experience suggested the answer might not be a pleasant one. Certainly the superpowers thought so; all three had voted in favor of letting the UN take the hot seat. Point man, stalking horse … the expendable ones. Sipping his ice water carefully, Saleh consciously relaxed his jaw and waited.

"The Ctencri greet you in response," the voice came abruptly. "It is ever an honor to welcome a new people into space. Your race has advanced greatly in the eight hundred years since you were last studied. It is hoped that we may find a solid base for trade and mutual profit."

Something in Saleh's chest seemed to loosen up slightly. Trade and profit were business, not political, terms. Was this, then, merely a trading expedition? Saleh couldn't decide whether he would feel relieved or annoyed if the Ctencri government had indeed left their first contact with Earth to the aliens' version of AT&T.

Whoever it was out there, though, he had one very important point to clear up right away. "We would certainly be interested in discussing trade possibilities,"

Saleh said. "However, we have several questions we would like to ask first.

Foremost among them is why your ships fired on one of our unarmed probes."

There was a short pause. "The question is meaningless. The defense units of Hreshtra-cten did not use force. Your lander was allowed to leave peaceably."

"You're referring to the incident with the Pathfinder," the American delegate spoke up from halfway around the table. "The Celeritas was in a different solar system when it was attacked."

"Only one ship entered Ctencri territory," the alien said. "The other presumably breached another people's region."

Saleh blinked. Two alien races … and both within ten light-years? The American President had implied it was a single race that surrounded Earth, not two or more.

Honest mistake or deliberate deception? "Perhaps you can help us contact the other … people," he said, fighting to get back on balance again. "Or at least assure them we weren't attempting an attack on their territory. We seek only to find new worlds—unoccupied worlds, of course—that we may peacefully colonize."

"That will be impossible."

"Why? Don't you have communication with them?"

"Pardon; you misunderstand. We will certainly aid you in contacting the other peoples. It is your seeking of worlds to colonize which is impossible."

Saleh frowned, his stomach tightening up again. "I don't understand."

"All suitable worlds are already occupied."

There was a moment of dead silence. "Occupied by whom?" the British delegate demanded.

"Many by their indigenous peoples," the Ctencri said. "Such worlds are closed to outside contact, as was yours until now. The remainder are occupied or claimed by space-going people such as ourselves."

"How many space-going races are there?" Saleh asked.

"The Ctencri have direct contact with nine others. The existence of seventeen more is known secondhand. We believe there to be many others."

The Russians didn't believe it, of course. Neither, to a lesser extent, did the Americans and the Europeans. The star ships were sent out again, in new directions. And again. And again.

Eventually, they were all convinced.

"So this is it," Saleh said, leaning back in his chair and gazing out the window at the lights of New York. They were glowing brightly, as usual, and the Yemeni felt his usual twinge of anger. The work at Oak Ridge and Princeton in the last century had guaranteed that the United States, at least, would not starve for energy for a long time to come … but the rest of the world still waited for the promised sharing of that technology.

Someone cleared his throat, and Saleh shifted his attention back to the five heads of state he'd invited to this meeting. "This makes no sense at all," Japanese Prime Minister Nagata said, laying down a copy of the report. "An Earth-type world complete with water and a breathable atmosphere and no metals! That's absurd."

"I only know what the Ctencri said," Saleh said, shrugging. "It's because the planet hasn't got any metals that we've even got a chance at it—otherwise the Rooshrike would have found a use for the place long ago."

"Could this be some sort of elaborate trap?" Premier Sing of the People's Republic asked. "I understand the Rooshrike are the ones who fired on the Celeritas."

"According to the Ctencri, the Rooshrike simply act impulsively at times," Saleh told him. "Apparently, they jumped to the wrong conclusion when the Celeritas didn't give the proper identification signals. I've been assured that's all straightened out now."

"Less likely a trap than a swindle," Russia's Liadov rumbled. "How much would the Rooshrike and the Ctencri want for this worthless lump of mud?"

"Nothing humans can live on is completely worthless," President Allerton said mildly, a soft gleam in his eye.

The Russian snorted.

"The cost actually isn't that bad," Saleh said. "It would come out to eighty million dollars' worth of certain relatively rare elements—the list of acceptable purity levels is on the last page. For that we would get a hundred-year lease with renewal option." He paused. "Which brings us to the reason I've asked you here tonight.

The rental fee would only be the tip of the iceberg if we intend to actually do anything with this world. Homes would have to be built, crops planted, industries started, colonists screened and trained—it would be a tremendous project."

"And so you've come to us for money," British Prime Minister Smythe-Walker put in dryly.

"Yes," Saleh nodded without shame. "The UN budget can't support something like this, let alone organize everything—we simply haven't the funds or manpower.

We would have to contract out parts of the operation, which would take even more money. So before I even bring this up to the Security Council and General Assembly, I need to know whether or not the money will be forthcoming from those who can afford it."

"Why bother?" Liadov shrugged. "You ask a great deal for the privilege of Eying the UN flag on a world with less economic value even than Venus. You would do better to fund expeditions to the Jovian moons."

"You overstate the case somewhat," Sing said, "but you are essentially correct.

This world does not seem worth its cost."

"Crops won't grow without traces of metal in the soil, for starters," Nagata put in.

"All food would need to be imported. And what could they export in exchange?"

"Other minerals," Allerton said, still skimming the report. "One of the continents appears to be ringed with underwater mineral deposits."

"What, silicates and such?" Smythe-Walker shook his head. "Sorry, John, but it's hard to imagine any rock formations worth carting up a gravity well and across forty light-years of space And there's still the thing with food, unless you want to add a few tons of iron and manganese silicates to the soil before you plant."

"Why not?" Allerton countered. "It's not as impractical as you make it sound."

"No—but it is expensive." Smythe-Walker looked at Saleh. "I'm sorry, but I don't believe His Majesty's government will be able to guarantee any support for such a project."

"Has it occurred to you—to any of you," Allerton added, glancing around the table, "that this whole thing might be some sort of test? That our willingness to take on what seems to be a hopeless task may be how all those aliens out there judge our spirit and ingenuity?"

"More likely testing our intelligence," Nagata murmured.

"I have an idea," Liadov spoke up. "As Mr. Allerton seems to be the only one of us interested in demonstrating mankind's resolve to our new neighbors—and as he is so fond of invoking Yankee ingenuity as the solution to all our problems—I suggest we give the United States a UN mandate to develop and administer this world. With a certain amount of UN support, of course."

"All right," Allerton said abruptly. "If I can get Congress to approve, we'll do it.

And"—he leveled a finger at Liadov— "we'll do it well."

The next day the matter was brought before the General Assembly, which endorsed the mandate by a 148 to 13 vote. A month later the U.S. Senate followed suit, and the world newly christened Astra became the center of perhaps the biggest project the Army Corps of Engineers had ever undertaken.

Eleven months after that, the first colonists arrived.