Starhawk

Chapter 36

FRANK WAS WAITING at the terminal with a tentative smile. He offered Jake his hand. “Good to see you. We hated to disrupt your retirement, but we really needed someone we could rely on.”

“You still haven’t heard from them?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay.”

“Does the terminal know to deliver your bags directly to the Baumbachner?”

“Yes.”

“All right. We want you to get going as soon as you’re able. We’ll have a room waiting at the Starlight when you get back.”

“Thanks.” They walked out onto the concourse.

“Jake,” said Frank, “I know you blame us for what happened with the Gremlin. But—”

“I don’t blame anybody, Frank. The system is what it is. It’s what we signed up for. Is Priscilla waiting in the ship?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” They stopped in front of the elevators. “I assume you guys did a thorough check of the Baumbachner?”

“Yes. It’s in good shape.”

“I hope so.”

They reached the elevators. Frank pushed the button. But he never took his eyes from Jake. “Have you been in touch with Priscilla since you left here?”

“A couple of times, Frank. Why?”

“I don’t think she’s been very happy working for us. I just wanted to let you know so you go easy on her. She tends to get a little emotional sometimes.”

The elevator opened. Jake got in. A woman in a station uniform joined him. “I never noticed a problem,” Jake said.

“When she was with you”—Frank held the door open—“when she was with you, she was doing what she cared about. But she’s had to make some adjustments here. Anyhow, just in case, you may want to cut her some slack.”

“All right, Frank. And we’ll let you know as soon as we have something.”

* * *

PRISCILLA WAS WAITING on the bridge. She broke into a big smile as he came through the hatch, got up, and threw her arms around him. “Jake,” she said, “you have no idea how glad I am to see you again.”

“Just like old times, huh?”

“Umm—I wanted to thank you.”

“For what?”

“Well, Frank asked me not to say anything. But I know you put pressure on him to let me go along.”

“My pleasure, Priscilla. I figured you were probably tired putting together payrolls.”

“I don’t have much to do with payrolls.”

“Well, making sure they have a decent supply of lubricants, then. Whatever. How’s it been going?”

“Okay,” she said.

“How’s Tawny?”

“Tawny’s fine. She likes Princeton.” She sat back down, and he climbed in beside her.

“It won’t go like this forever, babe. Just stay with it. Eventually, they’ll figure it out.”

“I don’t really have any complaints, Jake. I don’t guess I’ve made it easy for them.”

“They mean well, Priscilla. Just try not to alienate them, okay?”

“Sure.”

He studied the panel. “You run the check-off yet?”

“We’re primed and ready to go.”

The bridge was retro. It looked like something out of an old movie. “Is this thing really safe?” he asked.

“I hope so.”

“So do I.” He looked at the time. “We can get started as soon as my bags show up. I probably should have brought them down myself.” Priscilla glanced at the control panel. Then at Jake. “Stay where you are,” he said. “You’re in command. I’m just here as an observer.”

She smiled. “You’re one of the great men of our time, Jake.”

He actually blushed. “Whatever, but I don’t guess I’ll be much use if my stuff doesn’t show up soon.”

She called the terminal, asked about the bags, nodded, and disconnected. “They’re on the way.”

“You seem to be in a hurry, Priscilla.”

She laughed. Cleared her throat. “You want the truth, Jake?”

“Sure.”

“I want to get submerged before Wauken calls in, and they cancel the mission.”

“Isha Wauken? Is she on the Vincenti?”

“Yes. You know her?”

He smiled. “An old girlfriend.”

* * *

THEY EASED OUT between the launch doors, turned to their assigned course, and began to accelerate. “By the way,” she said, “I should introduce you to our AI. Her name’s Myra.”

“Good evening, Captain Loomis,” said the AI.

“Hello, Myra,” Jake said. “Nice to meet you.”

“The feeling is reciprocal.” Her seductive tone surprised Priscilla.

“Does she have a sense of humor?” Jake asked. “Or is that the way she normally talks?”

“It’s the first time I’ve heard her do that. I think you have a fresh conquest.” She checked the gauges. Then: “How’s it feel to be back?”

“Better than I’d expected. In fact, sometimes I’m sorry I left.”

“Jake, may I ask a personal question?”

“Sure.”

“Did they force you out? I never had the impression you really wanted to leave. You said you did, but—”

“Well, no, actually I didn’t want to leave. But I wasn’t forced out. At least not by Frank or Patricia.”

“Then by whom?”

He looked at her. Felt a surge of regret. “By you, Priscilla.” Her eyes went wide, and she stared at him. “It’s okay. I just—What? I couldn’t face people around here after we lost Joshua.”

“Jake—”

“Let’s just let it go, okay?”

“So why’d you come back?”

“Because somebody else out there might need help. And they didn’t have anybody else.” And he realized immediately he shouldn’t have said that.

Priscilla turned a laser gaze on him, but she didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t mean it that way, Priscilla. When Frank called, I thought about backing off, but I wasn’t sure they’d have been willing to send you on your own. You’re still new at this, and they don’t want to take any chances of anything more going wrong. They don’t know you the way I do. I mean, you could have gone out there and performed like Captain Brandywine, and they’d still have taken some flak for sending out a relatively inexperienced pilot.”

She softened. The anger faded. “Well,” she said, “thanks. Especially for getting me included in the deal.”

“It seemed like the least I could do. Though I wasn’t sure you’d want to go.”

“Of course I want to go. You think I wanted to sit in that office back there while you went out and did the mission?”

“I needed to be doing something useful,” he said. “I was tired just sitting on the front porch watching the world go by.”

* * *

THE EARTH, OF course, dominated the sky. Fleecy clouds floated over Asia, which was ablaze with city lights.

“We’ll be making our jump in a few minutes,” said Priscilla.

Jake checked to be sure his harness was secure. Sometimes the transition could be a bit rough. “Okay,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

She leaned over the mike. “Ops, this is Starhawk. We’re ready to make our jump.”

“Who?” The guy at the other end sounded startled.

“Kidding,” she said. “Make that Baumbachner.”

“Oh. Okay, Baumbachner. Roger that.”

“Has the Vincenti reported in yet?”

“Negative. We’ve heard nothing at all.”

* * *

SHE MADE HER jump into transdimensional space. “Time to target,” she told Jake, “thirty-three hours.”

“Who’s on the Vincenti?” he asked. “Other than Isha?”

Priscilla checked her notes. “Larry Martin and Gunther Hahn, both physicists, and Otto Schreiber, a doctoral candidate from Leipzig University. Martin’s described as a planetologist, whatever that is.”

“All right.”

“Making sure we don’t have more people than we can carry back, Jake? Just in case?”

“No. I don’t think Frank would make that mistake again. I was just wondering if there’d be any more familiar names.”

“Are there?”

“No. Just Isha.”

“How close were you?”

“It wasn’t much more than a few dinners.”

* * *

WHEN PRISCILLA RECEIVED responsibility for the Baumbachner, she took time to update its library. It had originally been not much more than a sparse collection of thrillers and technobooks. Those were still there, of course. But she’d added thousands of titles: novels, biographies, history, science, even some theological tracts. There were movies dating back two and a half centuries. “It doesn’t sound,” Jake said, “as if working for Frank takes much of your time.”

“The job is pretty much whatever I make it,” she said. “Mostly they want me there in case they need a pilot. And to do tours.”

“Does Myra play poker?”

It was a facetious question, of course. Myra was capable of playing all kinds of games, including multiple hands of poker, if need be, and doing it as separate entities. She was also capable of faking enthusiasm.

Ultimately, they mostly just talked. They watched a couple of movies, and went on a guided tour of the American Museum of Natural History. Priscilla used one of the ship’s imagers and spent hours combing through visuals from its interstellar library, looking for special effects she could plug into her tours back at Union. She recorded spectacular pictures of gas giants poised over mountaintops and dinosaur-like creatures drinking from rivers and explosive bursts erupting from solar surfaces. She played them for Jake, projecting them into the center of the passenger lounge, soliciting his opinion.

She did a few crossword puzzles while he watched football and baseball games that Myra had located for him, featuring the Pittsburgh teams, of which he was a longtime fan.

Jake missed the mountain cabin, the wind coming out of the trees, hanging out with the poker players, and having dinner with Alicia. It just seemed that, no matter how he did things, dissatisfaction crept in. There was always something missing.

* * *

AFTER ALL THESE years, he was still fascinated by conditions outside the ship when it was submerged. Though they were covering immense distances in an impossibly short time, one could never have guessed that by looking through any of the portals. The Baumbachner seemed to be almost adrift in a dark fog. Nothing else was visible. They might have been moving at possibly two knots. Certainly no more than that.

It was a completely different universe out there. He’d read about Barber space, as it was called. But none of the explanations made any sense to him. The physicists talked of multiple dimensions and quantum relativity. And he was pretty sure that, mathematics aside, they didn’t have a grasp of it any more than he did.

But it didn’t matter. It was there, it worked, and it opened large sections of the Milky Way to exploration. And that, in the end, was all he cared about.

An hour or so away from Orfano, he sat alone on the bridge, with a book on the auxiliary display. It was a collection of cartoons from Punch. Inevitably, though, his gaze would find the quiet mist outside.

* * *

PRISCILLA’S JOURNAL

If we’re going to do this kind of thing rationally, we’re going to need better communications. I don’t know if they’ll ever be able to reduce the amount of time a signal needs to get from one place to another. I suppose you really can’t complain when a transmission covers almost six light-years in a day. And it would be helpful if we could talk to each other while we’re submerged. Having to wait until we complete the jump before we can find out what’s happening is not convenient. We’ll probably eventually get better technology. And this equipment will wind up in museums.

—February 5, 2196