Harvest of Stars (67 page)

So the hoard accumulated, decade by decade until the catastrophe.

It was catastrophe in the mathematical sense, an event impossible to foresee, from which avalanched more. Alarms wailed in Perun. A computer analyzed the incoming signals and flashed their message. Lunarians cursed. Those who thought they might be called upon busked themselves. Word flew to their chieftains.

Instruments at Hades reported a large body bound from uncharted deeps toward a meeting with them. Defensive devices
in situ
, which had prevented several meteoroidal accidents, were inadequate to cope with something of asteroidal mass. Ordinarily the warning would have come in time for the Lunarians to dispatch amply powerful agents. This object, though, was on a trajectory not elliptical but hyperbolic. It must be a comet from the outer cloud, which, through some unlikely encounter, had gained more than escape velocity. Before humans could arrive at any endurable acceleration—no robots at Centauri had the intelligence necessary—the invader would work its harm and be gone.

One might lament the lack of immersion systems enabling flesh to survive scores of sustained gravities, but that was futile. None existed. There had never been any reason to suppose they would find enough use to be worth the cost of developing and building them.

“Get technicians from Demeter,” proposed a councillor. “They can reach the scene twice as fast as us.”

“It would take too long to recruit them and teach them all the intricacies,” Rinndalir replied. “Nor should we
reveal so much of our works or make ourselves so beholden. At two gravities, a picked crew with biomedical support can make the crossing in a spin period and arrive still fit for battle.” The weight and the day were of Earth’s Moon. “Already I know who my followers shall be.”

“Your followers, lord?”

“I have more experience in deep space than most.”

“True. Your occasional partner, the pilot Davis—”

“Irrelevant. Together we have done things valuable to both races, but this expedition is mine.”

“With due penance, lord, may I suggest that at your age—”

“You may not. Shall I concede the honor to, say, Asille of Arcen? Shall I accept the puissance that would flow to her? I will it otherwise.” Rinndalir laughed. “Moreover, what a game to play!”

Therefore two ships raged across the dark for a Lunar day and night. Sometimes Rinndalir heartened the crews in their suffering, sometimes he threatened or punished, sometimes he amused; and they endured.

At transit’s end, A and B were no more than the brightest of the stars, close together, and red Proxima had noticeably waxed. Hades sheened faintly athwart that night, a great globe scarred and crazed. Naked eyes barely picked out the light-points that were shepherds. Amplification and false color showed the inner ring as a misty blue glow. Streamers from it became lightning bolts where they met the outer one. A traveling corposant kindled to equal hellishness as it plunged through the inner band, sullenly dimming again when it left.

Rinndalir knew what was happening. Computers predicted it before he set forth. The comet, passing close, had badly perturbed all four satellites, and the system was no longer stable. Shepherd Chetyrye was the worst case, thrown into an orbit cleaving through as much as a fourth of the antimatter on each pass. Annihilation released energies that had by now boiled kilograms of precious gas irretrievably away, ruined the asteroid’s motor, and melted a surface turned lethally radioactive. The ring was going chaotic. Could the destruction be halted at once, repair was feasible, bringing the undamaged three back to
their stations and then adding a new companion. But soon it would be too late.

“My ship will strike,” Rinndalir radioed to the other vessel. “Stand by to dare a second attempt, should mine fail.”

The scheme was simple in principle. To initiate a change in the course of an asteroid, spatial engineers often hit it with a missile of the kind that Fireball folk, back in the Solar System, had called a mountain mover. A shaped nuclear detonation dug a shaft into which the main warhead burrowed before it let go its charge of antimatter. Thereupon a plasma volcano erupted in such violence that the body slipped into a new path, which was afterward refined by means more elegant. Thus had Golcondas of industrial minerals swung to where they could conveniently be processed, no longer taken out of the hide of Mother Earth.

Chetyrye was special. It could stand only a single assault like that, without breaking up into fragments still more destructive. In order to get it permanently away from the trouble zone, the blast must occur near the point of maximum effectiveness, when the renegade shepherd passed closest to Hades. This was inside the antimatter ring. However, because the ship could not be so near the explosion and live, the missile must pass through the band on its way. If it crossed the entire breadth, cumulative radiation for which its control systems were never intended would make idiots of them and it would run pilotless, targetless. Hence, before launching it, the ship herself must plunge halfway into the ring, a living hand at her helm.

Rinndalir ordered every precaution, screen fields at full potential, all four crewmen in spacesuits, mission profile calculated to the decisecond. But when he touched the console and felt the surge forward, he snarled like a tiger beholding its enemy.

Hades swelled before him in craters and crevasses, instruments blinked and shouted, the moment was come, he cast his spear, weight came down like a hammer as he darted back toward refuge.

Thunders crashed. Fire blazed from end to end of the hull. A crewman perished, drilled through the breast. Lights went out, blindness fell, split by bursts of radiance. Those were illusions, how the brain perceived ions ripping into retinae.

Backups kicked in. Rinndalir saw again, blurrily. “Haro, haro,” he called over intercom and radio. “How fare you? What has happened? Did our shot strike home?”

Two males replied from their shipboard posts. A voice afar said: “My lord, the telemetry appears to show that you encountered a solid antiparticle of pebble size. It pierced your hull and bounced about on jets of disintegration until it exited.”

“Can you number the radiation dose that was ours?”

“Not precisely, lord, but unequivocally lethal beyond any healing art. Honor be yours.”

Rinndalir grinned. “Mindless bad luck be mine. I had some tricks yet to play on Asille of Arcen.” Air whistled past his helmet, blowing into emptiness. He finger-shrugged. “How went the launch?”

“It struck truly, lord. The moonlet is well outbound.”

“Now that’s a wrong done me. I had hoped to watch those glorious fireworks.” Rinndalir commenced discussion of rendezvous procedures. His crippled ship would stay on trajectory and a gang from the other board her. His surviving crew told him, after inspection, that, given a little mending, she could limp home under low thrust.

“You’ll go to treatment in the swifter craft, do you choose,” he said to them. “You may perhaps live for months. Do you choose?”

They did. They were commoners, with kindred and, in Lunarian fashion, loves.

“Then I may leave you,” said Rinndalir.

He was not sure whether he felt the radiation burning him from within or the marrow rotting from his bones. Nor did he care. The meters told him enough. Nausea would not set in for a time more than he required. He unharnessed and pushed, free-falling, down passages where light shone queerly because they were airless, to the main personnel lock. His crewmen waited there for him.

They had brought their dead comrade along. Rinndalir’s hand drew the sign over the corpse that meant
You are one with me
. They helped him secure a drive unit to his spacesuit.

“Have you a word for sending, lord?” asked the senior of them.

“Nay.” Rinndalir thought. “Yes. Convey to … Pilot Kyra Davis on Demeter … that I remembered her.”

“Your word shall be ours, lord. Fare you well into your death.”

Rinndalir acknowledged with a nod and entered the lock chamber. The outer valve opened, framing a thousand stars. He passed through and kicked himself free.

A short while he drifted. The ship receded from him and he was alone. The only sounds left were breath and the knocking of his heart. Gyrating slowly, he saw the cold river of the galaxy stream past.

“Have done,” he said. It echoed in his helmet. He took bearings and started his jets. Blood and muscles responded to thrust. Before him steadied the sight of the ice world.

He reentered the inner ring. Antimatter seethed around him, riddled him, set him invisibly afire. He was long dead when he fell down onto Hades.

T
HE GROWTH AND
mutations of Port Fireball had scarcely touched Headland Street. A few more houses stood along it, but they were generally of the same modest size and Early American style as the oldest. Below them, cliffs still fronted a strip of beach and Shelter Bay reached beyond to the ocean. Mainly, there were now whole flocks of seabirds and every tree had become tall. On this winter day, elms and maples lifted bare against a low, heavy overcast, while evergreens challenged its gloom. The waters glimmered like steel. Demeter’s weak tide sent wavelets rustling against the shore. Little other sound was to hear. The air had gone from cold to a damp almost-warmth that felt somehow expectant.

Guthrie’s footfalls rang loud on pavement. Nobody else was in sight; most people were at work, of which they had no dearth. In his body that suggested a knight armored, he stopped at Kyra Davis’ home, turned, and strode up the path. As he mounted the porch step, a man and a woman came out.

Guthrie stopped. “Hello,” he said in his archaic fashion. “Were you watching for me?”

“Yes,” Hugh Davis confessed awkwardly. “We should receive you, sir, and be sociable, but—” He ran fingers through his grizzled hair.

“But I’m going in anyway,” Guthrie finished for him, “and you’ve been caged too damn much. It’s okay, son, m’lady.”

“Besides, we thought you might want to talk in private, you and she. Seeing as how you’ve arrived like this.”

“What? Hold on,” Guthrie demanded. “Has she gotten worse?”

“No, not really,” Charissa Davis reassured him. “She’s wide awake, in fact, cheerful, eager for your visit.” Her smile faded. “But—we don’t know—”

“She’s sinking fast,” Hugh said. “Plain to see, she doesn’t have many days left.” Pain edged his voice. “And she may be unconscious in the last two or three. We shouldn’t waste time you can spend with her.”

Charissa caught her man’s arm. “Please, sir,” she begged Guthrie, “you spoke of our feeling caged, but please don’t think we’ve minded caring for her. It’s been—not just a privilege. Mostly a pleasure.”

Faceless, Guthrie made a chuckle serve for a smile. “All the same, good of you,” he said. “Nobody should die in any goddamn hospital. M-m, before you go, how’s the family?” Whenever he phoned Kyra, the greeting he exchanged with this couple had been brief.

Hugh brightened. “Everyone doing fine, sir.”

Charissa’s own smile kindled. “Mikey came with his mother, day before yesterday—”

“Michael Rudbeck,” Hugh explained. “Tessa and Jack’s boy.”

“Sure, I’ve met the young rascal,” Guthrie said. “How’d it go?”

Charissa laughed a little. “He and Kyra are in love. They practically ignored everyone else, chattering and joking the whole while.”

“Well, a great-grandson. Go ahead, brag about him. Grandparents are entitled, in a way that parents aren’t.”

Hugh went serious. “Uh, sir, Mother’s strength is very limited. If you want to talk with her, you’d better go straight in.”

“Right,” Guthrie agreed. “Run along, you two.”

“We’re going for a walk,” Charissa told him. They needed the outdoors more than most folk, and of late had seldom been able to seek it together. “We’ll return in an hour.”

“Hasta la vista.”

They left. Guthrie went inside. The living room through which he passed was clutterful of memorabilia, bound printouts, a child’s patched and scruffy teddy bear, models of sailships and spaceships, a bit of wreckage, a small meteoroid, a glittery rock from the single planet that B had kept, more and more. … Among the pictures on the wall were those of several men. Kyra had referred to them as her rogues’ gallery. Two remained alive.

Her bedroom was austere. On the multi, which was placed for her to readily see it, she could evoke anything in
the databases, public or personal. At the moment it showed a blue and white house among birches, a lake behind, in the light summer night of Earth’s high North. Windows gave on her garden, bare under the darkling sky.

Guthrie trod to her where she lay. “Howdy, gorgeous,” he said.

She grinned from her pillow. “Hola, Tin Woodman.” He must amplify to hear her clearly. She touched her control bracelet. The bed elevated till she was half reclined. “Have a seat.”

He did, careful not to break the chair beneath his weight, and took her hand, flesh laid in metal and plastic. It was thin, nearly translucent. Her face bore the same pallor within the white mane, and was dominated by its bones, and the eyes had faded from hazel to gray. Yet she gazed steadily at him and said, “Gracias. That’s why I asked if you could come yourself this once. Your man-image in the phone is better looking, but you are real.”

“Sort of,” he replied, the least bit harshly.

Her grin widened. “That helps conversation. It’s less distracting. I don’t have to lust after you.”