The Sails of Tau Ceti (10 page)

Garth turned to the three members of his crew and announced that he would go first. He stepped forward and inserted his right gauntlet through a strap that hung down from the sloping cable that ran from the corvette’s midships airlock to an anchor point behind them. The strap was attached to a powered cable tow. As soon as Garth touched the tow, he was jerked off his feet and lifted skyward as the tow unit climbed the cable.

He reminded Tory of a circus performer as he hung there by one arm, swinging in a slow pendulum motion. The cable tow halted as Garth cleared the landing stage outside the airlock. He dropped off the hanging strap, sending the tow unit back for the next rider. A few seconds later, he disappeared through the airlock.

Tory was next to ride the tow into the black sky. She, too, sent the unit back before palming the airlock control. The outer door opened, she stepped over the raised coaming, and closed the door behind her. A few seconds later, she was buffeted by a brisk wind as air refilled the lock. A green light illuminated overhead, signifying that it was now safe to open the inner door

She found Garth in the airlock anteroom. He was already half out of his suit. He waited until she removed her helmet and let it drop to the length of its safety lanyard.

“Ready to go to work?”

“Ready.”

“As soon as you’ve stowed your suit, get up to the control room and start the diagnostic routines. I want continuous health monitoring on all systems from now to launch. If anything is going to go wrong, I’d rather have it happen while we’re still tied to this big rock.”

“Right.”

She stripped off her suit and slipped into the shipsuit that would be standard apparel for the next three years. To her surprise, Van Zandt did not attempt to watch her. For ten long seconds, both of them rubbed shoulder blades in their underwear as they studiously ignored one another. Tory finished dressing just as the third member of their party entered from the airlock. She waited until he, too, had removed his helmet.

“You must be Professor Guttieriz. I’m Victoria Bronson, Chief Engineer.”

“Hello, Miss Bronson,” he said as he shook hands with her. “Since we’re going to be together for quite some time, perhaps you should call me Eli.”

“I’m Tory. Sorry I wasn’t here to greet you when you got in.”

“No problem. I understand you were on Mars.”

She nodded. “A little rest and relaxation prior to heading out.”

He laughed. “It’s been a lifelong ambition of mine to see Mars. Here I am and I will not have the opportunity. Oh well, another time.”

“Kit still has to cycle through,” Garth warned. The suiting chamber was the size of a comm booth and one more person would cause it to overflow.

“On my way, Captain. I’ll see you later, Eli.” As she moved through the middle sphere’s circumferential passageway, she willed her implant to connect with the
Starhopper
computer just beyond the steel bulkhead. She immediately received the connect tone signifying that the link between herself and the computers was operating properly.

Tory pulled herself hand over hand to the axis passageway and from there up into the topmost of the ship’s three spherical modules. It was from the upper sphere that
Austria
was controlled. Besides the control room, it contained a wardroom, the converted bunkroom, and four tiny crew cabins. Each spherical module had an independent life support system able to sustain life for long periods in an emergency. The control module, however, had the amenities that would make the voyage bearable.

Tory noted that her meager luggage had been delivered and secured in her cabin. She swarmed through the axis passageway to the control room where she maneuvered herself into one of two acceleration couches. She drew a safety belt across her midsection and to loosely restrain herself. She then swung the engineer’s console over the couch and activated it.

The console lit up with a satisfyingNO ANOMALIESmessage as she began turning on the health monitoring subroutines. She watched the progress of the self-test software in her mind as it began exercising each system. It took the better part of an hour for the health monitors to run completely through a single cycle. She was hard at work on the third such when Kit Claridge poked her chubby features through the hatch.

“Lunch!”

Tory blinked. As was normal while under the influence of her implant, she had lost track of the time. That was a difficult concept for non-implant wearers to understand since the implant time signal was accurate to the microsecond. Yet, knowing the time is not the same as being aware that time has passed. For that Tory consulted her stomach, which agreed that lunch was overdue.

#

Twelve days later, Tory was again strapped into her acceleration couch. This time she was using all of the available restraints, including the ankle loops that kept her legs from flopping around.
Starhopper
was no longer tied to Phobos. All cables and other ground connections had been removed following fueling of the booster.

“Launch status check, Engineer!” Garth ordered from the couch next to Tory’s. All trace of the friendly banter he had cultivated over the past six weeks was gone. He was now a ship’s captain facing the most critical moment in any flight — liftoff!

“We are ready, Captain,” Tory responded as she finished checking the booster’s status via her implant, and scanned the readouts on the main viewscreen.

“Very well,” Van Zandt replied. “Pass control to the ship’s computer. Let us see what the brain can do. Monitor and be prepared to override.”

“Aye, sir.”

Down in
Austria
’s hold, the twin electronic brains came fully awake and began their own pre-launch checks. They polled the health of thousands of mechanisms, and then compared notes. The booster’s 24 oversize reaction mass tanks were filled with slush hydrogen as ten kilograms of antiprotons orbited in the booster’s four magnetic confinement tori.
Starhopper
’s mass had increased by more than 100,000 tons over the past forty eight hours, and the additional inertia would make the booster/corvette combination response to commands sluggish. The additional inertia of all that reaction mass made it especially critical that everything work properly on lift off.

The automatic checkout continued for nearly ten seconds. At the end of that time, the computers reported their readiness for launch.

“Ready, Captain. All systems check out nominal.”

“Stand by,” Van Zandt ordered. “Professor Guttieriz!”

The small linguist was strapped down in his cabin aft.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” came the reply.

“Professor Claridge?”

Kit too was strapped down in her cabin. “Ready to launch, Captain.”

“Chief Engineer Bronson?”

“Ready, Captain.”

“Very well. Control, this is
Starhopper
. We are ready to lift.”

“Your trajectory is clear of traffic,
Starhopper
. You are cleared out of the inner zone.”

“All right, Engineer, you may release the jinn from its bottle.”

Tory sent the impulse that transferred final control to the computer. The effect was immediate. Somewhere aft, a dozen small reaction jets came alight. Nothing happened for a second or two, and then the radar altimeter began to register a slow climb. When the velocity indicator registered 10 meters per second, the reaction jets grew silent.

Starhopper
continued to drift slowly skyward. It had effectively escaped the small moon’s gravitational hold and was now in orbit about Mars.

“We’re safely away, Captain,” Tory reported unnecessarily.

“Very well, Engineer. Begin final checks of the antimatter system and electromagnetic nozzle. We head into the deep black as soon as we clear the inner traffic zone.”

#

Faslorn of the Phelan stared at the image of Sol and its planets and marveled at the sight. His ancestors had studied this yellow star from the moment they had discovered it to be the source of artificial generated electromagnetic radiation. Following the destruction of Tau Ceti, his predecessors had studied Sol to glean as much information as possible. For much of the long voyage from the home system, however, Sol’s nine children had remained invisible to Phelan telescopes. All the knowledge they had of the system came from human broadcasts.

It had not been until the cycle of Faslorn’s birth that the ship’s telescopes had first picked out the faint sparks of Sol’s attendant worlds. Jupiter had been first, of course, followed by Saturn, Venus, and Earth. Over the revolutions, all of the solar planets had been observed save two. The innermost, Mercury, was lost in the glare of the star, even when advanced obscuration techniques were attempted. The outermost, Pluto, was too far out and badly positioned for observation. Neither failure was of much interest to the Phelan. Their vision remained firmly fixed on the third of Sol’s children.

For all the time they could see them, Phelan telescopes had watched the changing pattern of sunlight on the solar worlds. Each planet showed as a nearly full circle when on the far side of the sun, and as a tiny sliver of light when near. As they watched, Faslorn and his crewmates saw a system very like home. Two worlds in the home system had been twins of Jupiter, while hot, cloud shrouded Milsa had been Venus’s counterpart. Earth resembled lost Phela as closely as one world can resemble another. Even the oversize Luna had its counterpart in Phela’s largest moon.

Faslorn’s current interest, however, was in none of the worlds of Sol. His attention was fixed on a patch of violet-white fog that would have been invisible had the computers not noted its presence.

“The astronomers are certain that this is a ship coming to meet us?” Faslorn asked his chief advisor.

“There can be no doubt,” Rosswin replied. “They have been observing the cloud for twenty watches. At first, they thought it the exhaust of an interplanetary liner en route from Mars to an outer world. They became suspicious when the cloud did not move like a ship in the main planetary plane. When it did not fade away at the proper time, they began taking Doppler measurements. There can be no doubt. It is moving directly toward us.”

“How fast?”

“At the beginning of this watch, at 0.0413 fraction of luminal velocity.”

“What is the delay in the light reaching us?”

“One-quarter cycle.”

“Then if the vehicle continued boosting, it could actually be moving much faster by now. Could it be a weapon?”

“Our human psychologists put the probability at less than two dozen parts in a gross,” Rosswin replied. “They think it more likely that the humans have modified the interstellar probe they were building and are using it to send a ship out to meet us.”

Faslorn’s posture showed his concern. “A development we had not foreseen.”

“What are your orders?” the advisor asked. His lower two arms hung at his side, much as a human’s would, while the upper set was clasped across the barrel of his chest. The position was that of respect, a subordinate awaiting instructions.

Faslorn’s ears flicked as he considered this new factor in their plans. “Perhaps this is not the problem we had feared. It will give us the opportunity to fine tune the masquerade before we have to face the human multitudes.”

“Is that wise?”

“What choice have we? You will issue orders to all human specialists. I want to be advised of their preliminary assessments as soon as possible.

“It will be done.”

CHAPTER 8

Tory Bronson woke to bitter, biting cold. She lay there and wondered what had gone wrong with the power to her sleeping bag. Surely, Ben had not gotten up during the night and dialed the tent back to transparency so that he could look at the stars. He had been on Mars long enough to know better than that, hadn’t he?

She found that willing her eyelids open was the hardest work she had ever done. When she could finally see again, the tent on Sutter’s Peak was nowhere to be found. In its place was a translucent barrier only a few centimeters in front of her nose. She watched without understanding as the glass alternately fogged and then cleared in time with her breathing. Then an ice cube melted somewhere inside her brain and her memories came flooding back.

They had spent six weeks climbing the mountain of velocity after leaving Phobos. Each day the sun shrank a little as the thrum of the engines continued without letup. Those long weeks had been punctuated by periodic engine shutdowns as empty reaction mass tanks were jettisoned. Tory envisioned a long string of white spheres extending all the way back to Mars like a string of pearls. They had passed the orbit of Jupiter at the end of the first week, that of Uranus during week two, and Pluto only three days later. Once out of the Solar System, they had continued accelerating until they were moving as quickly outbound as the light sail was falling inward. By the end of the sixth week,
Austria
was two dozen times Pluto’s distance from Sol.

For much of the journey, Tory had been too busy to think about the enormous gulf of space between herself and home. The first week she had done nothing but watch the operation of the booster. Her only breaks had been for meals, quick trips to the head, and catnaps. She had used her implant to monitor the flow of plasma, the interplay of magnetic fields, and a thousand other parameters. The booster had become a living, breathing entity to her. The steady flow of antiprotons and hydrogen into the reaction chamber were its lifeblood, the network of fiber optic cables, its ganglia.

At the end of a long week, Tory had retired to her cabin to sleep the clock around. After that, she had joined the others in standing the regular watches that Garth insisted on while the engines were operating. When not on watch, Tory repaired software glitches uncovered by the health monitors. The worst of these she shipped to the programmers on Mars and Earth, while the minor problems, she repaired herself. Besides watches and software maintenance, she took her turn cooking, cleaning, and performing light maintenance.

None of which explained how it was that she was freezing with her nose pressed up against a piece of frosted glass. Her situation reminded her of a joke she’d once heard: “You know it’s going to be a bad day when you wake up lying face down in the gutter and can’t remember know how you got there!” Then, as though the thought had been a catalyst, her sluggish brain gave up another memory.