Infinity Beach (29 page)

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 turn, 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 off-screen.

“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.”

“If it were going to blow us up,” said Kim, “I’d think it would have done so by now.”

“You’re probably right. So we should be safe. For the moment.”

“How do you mean,
for the moment
?”

“We can’t very well take it home.”

“Why not?”

“It might be a tracking device.”

“You don’t really think that’s so?”

“What else would it be if it’s not a bomb?”

She thought it over. “It could be a gift.”

“Like at Troy?”

“Solly, we may be getting a little paranoid here.”

“Yep. Of course, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with a little paranoia when you’re being chased. We’ve no idea of their capabilities. And so far their intentions don’t seem especially friendly.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s get rid of it.”

Solly nodded. “My thought exactly.”

The object clung to the hull, not far from the main air lock.

Solly got up and started for the door. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

“What are you going to do?”

They left the pilot’s room and walked downstairs. Solly opened a closet in the main floor entry. “Only thing we can do. Go outside and shoo it away.” He frowned. “It’s probably not dangerous, Kim. If they’d wanted to attack us, they’d have done so by now. Chances are, they’re hoping we didn’t notice we’ve got a piggyback.”

She nodded. “What do you want
me
to do?”

“Stay put and keep warm.” He selected an insulated bar and hefted it. “This should work.”

“How about if
I
go out this time?”

“How much EVA experience do you have?”

“How hard can it be?”

“It isn’t hard. But it helps to know what you’re doing.” He kissed her.

“Solly,” she said, “why would they put something on the hull that we can just go outside and remove?”

“You’re suggesting they didn’t.”

“That’s right. I’m suggesting it isn’t going to come loose.”

“Let’s find out.”

Kim had played enough chess to know the basic credo: always assume the opponent will make the best possible move. “I don’t like this,” she said.

Solly managed to look as if everything were under control. “It might be just a mind game. If it’s anything more, if something happens out there, tell Ham to head for St. Johns, okay? Don’t go home. If we have to risk losing something, let’s make it the outpost and not Greenway.”

She felt drained watching him climb into a pressure suit. And she thought suddenly of the Beacon Project.
Here we are. Come get us.
But no, it really couldn’t be like that. It was not reasonable.

“What irritates me about all this,” she told him over the link as he finished dressing and climbed into the air lock, “is that I never seem to be able to do anything to help.”

“So far you’ve done it all, Kim. Now sit tight and I’ll be back in a half hour.”

They ran a radio check, shut off the gravity, and turned on all the portside exterior lights. Minutes later the panel indicated the outer door had opened. She directed the AI to watch Solly with whichever imagers it could bring to bear.

“Kim,”
said Ham,
“he also has a camera atop his helmet.”

“Can you activate it?”

“Of course.”

“Do so.”

Pictures appeared on three screens, a side view of Solly, one from the rear, and the view from his helmet. A fourth imager locked on the object.

Solly attached his tether to a safety ring just outside the air lock and strode purposefully across the hull, secured by magnetic boots.

There were no stars, and consequently no sky. Space and time existed in this nether-universe, though the latter seemed to run at a variable rate, and the former was squeezed. This did not resemble, say, a night under thick clouds; because even the clouds would have been
visible
, sensible objects whose presence was
felt
, whose weight pressed down on an observer. This was a true
void
, an absence of everything, a universe which theory held to contain neither matter nor energy, save that which occasionally penetrated from outside, through the agency of jump engines.

It reminded her of the terrifying moments in the spillway, when the world had closed down on her,
buried
her. When the only light, cast by her wristlamp, had faded into a darkness of mind and spirit that might have gone on forever.

Solly moved among the antennas and sensors and housings littering
Hammersmith
’s hull. She watched him draw close to the object, watched him turn his light on it.

It had come to rest between a service hatch and a sensor mount.

“What do you think, Kim?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” she said. “Be careful.”

He touched it with the tip of his bar. There was no reaction. “I’m going to give it a poke,” he said.

“Gently,” she advised.

“Poking.”

She saw no reaction.

“It’s on pretty good,” said Solly. “Probably magnetized.”

He stooped down and tried to wedge the bar
beneath
it. The saddle seat irised open. Kim jumped.

So did Solly.

It was as if a dark eye looked up at them.

“Solly,” she breathed.

“I see it.” The opening was as wide around as her hand was long. The darkness was palpable, a couple of centimeters deep.

“Be careful.”

Solly waited to see whether anything else would happen. When it didn’t, he went back to trying to work the bar under the object. Kim’s view was poor: everything was a mix of shadows and bright lights and Solly’s arms. She wished they could bring it inside, look at it, but even that seemed dangerous.

Who would have believed it? They had obtained an apparently genuine extraterrestrial artifact, and they were going to throw it away.

She wanted desperately for this to be over and Solly to be back inside.

He worked the bar in and was grunting loudly as he pushed down. And suddenly the hull and the sensor mount, half-seen in the uncertain light, seemed to
ripple
.

The effect came and went so quickly that she wasn’t sure she’d really seen it.

The object came loose.

“Okay,”
Solly said. He got his right hand under it and peeled it off like a man removing an orange skin. When it was clear, he lifted it high, held it for her to see and the imager to record, turned it a half dozen ways so they missed
nothing. Then he flung it away. She watched it spin out into the dark.

“Good show, Solly.”

“Thanks.”

Solly pushed the bar into his belt and retreated into the air lock. He switched over to the AI’s channel. “Ham, where’s the object?”

“Still outbound, Solly. At three kilometers per hour. Showing no sign of internal power.”

She glanced up at the screen dedicated to Solly’s helmet imager and watched the lights come on in the air lock. The door swung shut and gravity returned throughout the ship. She could see the bench opposite the one he was sitting on. And part of the control panel, a blinking amber lamp, a hand rail, and one of Solly’s feet.

“Ham,” he said, “Track the object as long as you’re able. If there’s any change, let us know.”

“I’ll do that, Solly.”

The amber lamp would continue to blink until air pressure reached normal. Then it would turn green.

Kim was wrestling with the problem. It was possible the
Hunter
had blundered the first contact, and it might be that she was now doing the same thing. “We might wind up being a laughingstock for future historians, Solly,” she said.

“I just don’t like any of this, Kim. We’ve established there’s something here. Now I think we need to turn the whole thing over to a team that can come out here prepared to—”

The amber light dulled.

And brightened.

It wasn’t supposed to do that.

“—To do the thing systematically,” Solly concluded.

Behind the lamp, the wall and the control panel
wrinkled
. In the way of a strip of pavement on a hot day.

It was gone almost before the sensation had registered. “Solly,” she said, “are we having an imager problem?”

“No,” he said. “I saw it too.” The silence in the ship was
overwhelming. She left the pilot’s room and was waiting by the air lock when it opened. Solly came out.

She put all the lights on in the entryway and looked into the air lock. Everything seemed normal.

“Ham,” she said. “Rerun the sequence from the helmet imager, beginning about four minutes ago. Put it on one of the entry windows.”

There were two large windows in the entryway. Both had carried images of the skies as they might have been seen from Greenway. Now one went dark and then lit up with Solly entering the air lock.

“Too recent,” she said. “Back it up another couple of minutes.”

“It was just a power dip,” said Solly.

“Maybe.”

She watched him moving rapidly backward, saw the saddle in reverse flight, watched it sail in toward him, saw him put it down on the hull. Use the bar.

Solly-in-the-window worked backward furiously on the saddle. The circular opening in the seat closed.

“Okay,” she said. “Stop, Ham. Run it forward.”

Solly laid his helmet down, peeled off the suit, and sat down to get out of the boots.

The sensor mount rippled again.

“Ham,” said Kim, “hold it.”

Solly’s brow creased. They ran it several times. Then she took him to the sequence in the air lock, and they watched the amber lamp fade and brighten and the control panel lose its definition. It seemed to fold slightly, and darken, as if something had passed in front of it, as if the space it occupied had changed in some indefinable way.

“Does that—” she stared at the image on the monitor, “—normally happen out here?”

“No.” He switched over to the forward hull imager, backed up the record, and they watched the entire scenario from another angle.

The sensor mount was in the foreground. Solly was behind it. And this time, it was
Solly
who rippled.

“I don’t understand that,” he said.

Kim’s heart had picked up a beat. “It scares me, Solly.”

When they peeled away her jumpsuit, they saw that something had cut Emily almost in half at the waist. The flesh was charred, the trunk partially severed, but there was no blood.

“They cleaned her up before putting her out the airlock,” said Solly, pulling a sheet over the mutilated body.

“What could have happened to her?” asked Kim.

“A laser, maybe.” Solly looked puzzled.

They returned the corpse to its container and Kim kept reminding herself that at least now she knew. But it wasn’t much consolation.

Analysis of the recordings provided no clue as to what, if anything, had happened on the hull or in the air lock. A trick of the light, perhaps. Or disturbances in the space-time continuum. After all, Solly had been
outside
the ship. Maybe there
were
side effects when you opened up air locks to hyperspace. Indeed, no other explanation offered itself. So they put it out of their minds, as best they could, and resumed their normal shipboard routine.

And as the days passed with no recurrence of the effect, they forgot about it altogether.

Meantime, the conversation centered on the kind of reception they’d receive when they got back to Greenway. Police or a parade? Kim was unwaveringly optimistic. You cannot prosecute the person who answers one of the great all-time scientific and philosophical questions. Solly, who’d been around longer, suggested that their accomplishment would only serve to anger Agostino even more. “We might look good to posterity,” he said, “but the locals may take a different view. Remember Columbus?”

“What about him?”

“Died in a Spanish prison.”

On the other hand, Kim thought Agostino could be relied on to milk the mission for all it was worth, to make it sound
as if it had been an Institute initiative from the start. In that case, their careers would be safe as long as they cooperated.

Kim believed her interest in the sciences to be generally selfless, spurred primarily by a desire to push the frontiers of knowledge forward, to be part of the collective effort. She didn’t think she’d been in it for herself. But she resented the prospect that someone else might try to grab the credit after she’d gone through so much.

Five nights out of Alnitak, Kim, absorbed in these thoughts, was showering for dinner.

Because there were only two people on board, there was no pressing need to conserve the water supply. She had just rinsed her hair and was using a towel to dry her face before opening her eyes. But she sensed movement in the washroom.

“Solly?” she asked.

Once before he’d slipped in while she was in the shower, and had taken advantage of the opportunity, wrapping the curtain around her and fondling her through the translucent plastic.

But he did not answer and when she looked no one was there.

She dismissed the incident and the mild disappointment, dressed, and went down the hall for dinner, which included chicken, a fruit salad, and hot bread. They were talking about inconsequentials when Ham broke in:
“Solly,”
he said.
“I am losing control over some of my functions. They are being rerouted elsewhere. To an alternate manager.”

“That can’t be,” said Solly. “Are you reporting a virus?”

“It is difficult to say precisely what the cause is, Solly.”

“Which systems are you losing?”

“I am having some difficulty with communications, diagnostics, life support. The deterioration is continuing as we speak.”

“Ham, what can we do to rectify the situation?”

“I do not know. You might wish to consider going to manual. If the process continues, I will shortly become unreliable.”

“Can we do that?” asked Kim. “Can we get home on manual?”

“Oh, sure,” said Solly. “It just means we’ll have to throw all the switches ourselves. And we might chip a little paint at the dock. Otherwise it’s no problem.” Nevertheless he looked worried.