The getaway special (19 page)

Judy blew a soft whistle. "Holy cow. They must be thick as flies out there." She studied the image in the monitor, but she couldn't tell planets from stars. They were all just bright specks, and this far from the Sun, none of the constellations were familiar. "Can we get a size on any of them?" Allen looked at the list. "There's a couple that're only half a million kilometers away. Not much farther than the Moon from Earth. We should be able to zoom in on one." He didn't bother to state the obvious: if either of the nearby planets had been of any size, they would have seen it already as their spaceship rotated and gave them a 360-degree panorama. He reached out to the camera controls mounted beneath his monitor and upped the magnification, but that merely narrowed his field of view and made the star field slide by faster, so he took the joystick and tried to direct the camera to follow one of the stars. That was tougher than it looked. Judy tried it with her camera, but she had no better luck than he.

"I don't suppose you've got a program that'll do this, do you?" she asked hopefully.

"Nope," he asked. "I could probably cobble something together, but it would be simpler if we just stopped our rotation and let the program we've got point out where we need to look."

"Um, that's going to take a lot of air." Each time Judy had vented air into space, the tank's spin had increased. They weren't rotating all that fast, but there was quite a bit of mass involved, and it would take an equal amount of Force applied in the other direction to cancel out all that angular momentum. They could do it with the valve tapped into the opposite side of the tank, but Judy had just refreshed their air; venting more now would be a waste.

On the other hand, waiting for their air to grow stale so they had a good excuse to vent it was kind of dumb, too. "Oh, to hell with it," she said. "We've got six hours' worth; let 'er rip." She got ready on the oxygen tank while Allen opened the faucet next to his elbow, but she didn't crack the valve right away.

"Uh, it's getting a little thin, isn't it?" he asked as the altimeter needle swung past 20,000 feet and began its second lap of the dial. He closed the faucet and swallowed to make his ears pop. She kept her valve closed. "We can survive for a few seconds at low pressure. Keep going."

"Ooo . . . kay." He let more air out. She let it go up to 24,000, then nodded to him and turned on the oxygen flow while he closed the vent. She stopped at 16,000 this time; they'd been breathing oxygen-enriched air long enough that they were probably safe from the bends at that altitude by now. Their spin had slowed considerably. Now they could let the program flag the points of light they were interested in and zoom in on them manually. It was still hard to hold the cameras on them at high magnification, but they could do it long enough to learn what they needed to: even at the highest power, they could detect no sign of a disk on either of the two closest planets. Nor did any of the others show as more than bright specks of light.

"Looks like a bunch of asteroids," Judy said.

"It does, doesn't it?" Allen stared at the screen for another thirty seconds or so, then typed in the coordinates for the closest target. "What the heck; we might as well go have a look. I've never seen an asteroid up close."

"Up close" was the operative term. The moment he pushed the "Enter" button, the external monitors filled with a rugged, grayish-green surface that looked like it was only a couple feet away.

"Yeow!" Judy started backward in surprise and banged her head on the side of the septic tank, but she didn't give herself even a moment to register pain; she just immediately pushed herself back down and checked the monitor again to see if they were moving toward it or away. She couldn't tell at first. The image was sliding past too quickly. She grabbed the joystick to try following a landmark for a second, but the moment she moved it and saw how touchy the camera was, she realized she had left the magnification all the way up. When she zoomed out again, the surface didn't look nearly as close. Nor did it look like an asteroid.

It looked more like a thicket of vines entangling a pile of rocks, boards, and rusty scrap metal. It looked, in fact, like Nicholas Onnescu's back yard. If she hadn't seen the tiny size of the crater in his yard, she would have thought maybe he had come here first on his way to Alpha Centauri, but as her eyes picked out more details she realized that the scale was all wrong. This went on for miles. It wasn't even remotely spherical, either. It was more of an oblong, like a stretched-out football, or maybe a disk seen mostly edge-on. The more Judy looked at it, the more she thought it resembled a cityscape. A cityscape reflected in a lake, with waves distorting the image at all angles, but there was definitely order to it.

Allen was staring at it like a deer staring at a pair of oncoming headlights. "Holy shit," he whispered.

"There
is
an interstellar empire."

22

They were moving toward it, but not so fast that they had to dodge immediately. "Try the radio," Judy said.

Allen slowly undipped the microphone and held it up to his mouth. When he spoke, there was none of the cockiness he'd shown around Alpha Centauri. His voice was a high-pitched squeak as he said,

"Hello? This is—" He cleared his throat and tried again. "This is Allen Meisner and Judy Gallagher of Earth. Can you hear us? We, uh, we'd like to come in and say 'Hi.' " He let off the microphone and said, "Shit, that sounded stupid. They'll think we're morons."

"We got here on our own power," Judy said. "They've got to respect that."

"But look what we got here
in
!"

"Like they're going to know what it's supposed to be used for?" The moment she said
that
she wondered how stupid that was. Anybody who could build structures like this in space—and this many of them at that—could probably figure out in an instant not only what their spaceship was made of, and what the tank's intended purpose was, but where it came from and what it carried as well. She kept her eyes on the monitors. Hers showed the entire space station, or colony, or whatever it was. Its spiky protrusions cast stark shadows across the irregular core, giving it a sharp-edged, technological look, but Allen's monitor still showed the close-up image, and that displayed a much more organic aspect. The ductwork or transport tubes or whatever they were really did look like vines, complete with a rough green surface that resembled bark much more than it did metal. The lumpy habitat modules they enclosed had a more pebbly coating, like lizard skin.

There was no answer to their radio call. Allen switched the receiver to scan mode and let it cycle through all the frequencies it could pick up, but there were no transmissions on any band. He picked a frequency at random and tried transmitting again. "Hello, this is the Earth vessel
Getaway Special
calling. Do you copy?"

No response. He tried at least a dozen more times, picking a new frequency for each attempt, but if anyone heard him, they showed no sign.

It looked like they weren't going to hit the station after all. Their motion was going to take them close, but they would pass under it by a few thousand feet. Judy held her breath as they approached, half expecting a missile or a laser beam or some alien death ray to lance out and blow them to smithereens, but the station showed no sign that anyone on board even noticed they were there. She supposed it was possible that she and Allen had slipped in under their radar, so to speak, but that thought only scared her all the more. She knew what humans would do in a similar situation once they
did
detect an intruder; in fact she had experienced it firsthand less than a week ago.

"Get ready to jump," she whispered.

"Where?"

"Anywhere. We don't know they're friendly."

"We don't know they're
they
," Allen pointed out.

"What do you mean by that? This thing's big enough to hold a couple of million people. I don't care how big the guys who built it are; there's more than one of 'em on board." He clipped the microphone back onto the radio and keyed in a set of jump coordinates. "I don't know. I don't see any evidence of habitation here. No windows, no handholds, no airlocks, no docking ports—nothing like that. If it's a space station, it's not run by beings who think like us. And if they don't think like us, they may not
be
like us, not even on a fundamental level. This could be a big blob of bacteria living off the solar wind for all we know."

Judy had to swivel the camera all the way to its upper limit to keep it aimed at the station as they swept past. It was no blob of bacteria, of that she was certain. But Allen had a point: it didn't look like anything humans would build, either. It was too organic. It had hard edges, but they were the kind of edges you would find on a thorn bush or a seashell.

The camera couldn't zoom out enough to keep the whole thing on the monitor anymore. It was so big, size became an abstract concept. Watching it pass on the screen felt just like scanning a soil sample with an electron microscope. The pipes could be fungal mycelia; the spiky things could be diatoms; the irregular lumps could be cells.

It was growing cold in the tank. They were too far from the star, and radiating too much heat. The plastic walls would grow brittle if they lost much more. Judy's sense of adventure felt like it was already close to cracking. It was fine to imagine meeting aliens when your mental picture of them came from watching
E.T
. as a child, but when she was actually there, floating closer to a city-sized space station—

maybe—she didn't feel nearly so enthusiastic about it.

She looked to the lumpy sleeping bag at her feet. Had she put Trent's gun in there? Could she get to it in time to defend herself if she needed it? She was appalled at herself for even thinking that, but it was an involuntary reaction.

A pistol would be useless here anyway. The thing was huge. Their entire spaceship, such as it was, could smack into it at orbital velocity and still not do more than superficial damage. She and Allen watched it slide past, its irregular surface growing more and more filled with shadow as they moved away from the sunlit side. There could be anything waiting in those pools of darkness. Weapons, predators, antibodies ...

Or nothing at all. The artifact swept past, then receded into the distance, becoming just a ragged line of backlit extrusions outlining a black oblong that blotted out the sun. Judy breathed again, but at the same time she felt more disappointed than she had since she'd been the ugly girl at a high school dance. "They . . . 'it' . . . whatever . . . just ignored us."

"Looks like it," Allen said. He consulted the navigation program again and typed in another set of coordinates.

"Where are we going now?"

"I want to have a look at another one. Maybe we'll have better luck there." Judy looked at the dark mass again. "Yeah, like maybe this one was just asleep or something," she said facetiously, but the moment she said it, she realized she meant it. The second one looked exactly like the first. They had to make two jumps to get as close to it as they had come by accident before, but it paid them no more attention than its twin. And the more Judy stared at it, the more convinced she became that it wasn't a space station. She wasn't quite ready to believe that it was a living organism, either, but whatever it was, it paid no more attention to them than she would to a dust mite.

They tried a third one with no more success. Judy had relaxed by then, at least as much as possible when she was fifty light-years from home in a spaceship the size of a closet. Her pressure suit was starting to chafe, and her bladder was giving her the one-hour warning. She was normally good for four or five hours, but she hadn't had a chance to pee since she'd gotten up that morning. And they were already a third of the way through their air supply. That was the critical factor. She could urinate in the suit if she had to, but once she and Allen got down to the end of their air, they would have to go back to Earth and try it again.

As they watched the unresponsive whatever-it-was recede into the distance, she said, "I don't think we're going to learn much more unless we actually match velocities with one and go over for a closer look in our suits. And that would take time we don't have."

Allen reluctantly agreed. "Yeah, matching velocities would be a real trick. We'd have to calculate the vector we need, then go find a planet we could use as a gravity well, then pop back here. We don't have radar, so we'd probably have to fine-tune it with three or four jumps." He looked from the monitor to Judy. "But we can't just leave without figuring out what they are, can we?"

"Do we have a choice?"

He grimaced. "No. Damn it, no, we don't. Shit!" He whacked his hand against the tank. The hollow
bong
sounded like a church bell tolling the death of his dream.

"I'm sorry," Judy said. "We could try again later. Come back with a real spaceship that we can maneuver. But for now, we've either got to find someplace where we can breathe the air, or go back home in about four hours and hope we can avoid the authorities long enough to recharge our oxygen tank."

Allen's angry outburst had propelled him sideways against the hyperdrive. He pushed himself back down onto his beanbag chair and cinched the strap around his waist to hold himself in place. "You're right" he said. "Damn it. This isn't what we came for." He called up the starmap program, got the coordinates for the next star in the cluster of nearby sunlike ones, and keyed them in. A moment later, they were there. It only took two jumps this time; there had been no need to escape a planet's gravity well.

Judy wished they could escape the aura of gloom that had settled over her, too. She knew she wasn't being logical—she had just come over fifty light-years from home!—but she hadn't bargained on finding incomprehensible artifacts that might or might not have even been artifacts. Their size, rather than filling her with awe, had merely made her feel insignificant. And that on top of finding Alpha Centauri's perfect planet not only discovered already, but in the process of being colonized—it was too much to bear in one day.