The Sunborn (40 page)

“We’ve got less than two minutes to impact,” Chow-Lin said, deliberately calm.

“Can we use the exhaust against it?” Shanna said.

“Worked on the Beings, but not on this,” Viktor answered on comm. “It’s got a lot of mass.”

“Who’s it going to hit?” Julia demanded.

Franklin said, “
High Flyer.
Seventy-eight seconds.”

Julia froze. “Victor!” she cried. She was not looking at the radar images Chow-Lin had called up on the big screen. She stared into empty space. “Can you use the drive against them?”

“Not much time,” he said. “Drive cannot stop big solid thing.”

“Then—”

“Joke—when is weapon not a weapon?”

Julia cried, “What are you—”

“When is a space drive.” Viktor’s voice came absolutely flat and calm. “Am rotating.”

“What?” Julia asked.

“Best to turn about axis.” Viktor’s voice was still controlled. “Cannot singe, cannot dodge, can do the—is French?—pirouette.”

The radar image showed the long mass of
High Flyer
turning about its center, side jets flaring white-bright and hard. Chow-Lin sharpened resolution, and it was huge, jagged.

The rock came by in an eyeblink. Just a few meters to the side of
High Flyer.

They applauded and cheered. Viktor’s calm, steady tone said, “Comes another.”

Julia’s heart leaped. The radar showed a half dozen more, all homing in on
High Flyer,
all as big as houses—enough to stave in the big nuke and blow it into history. She watched the now spinning cylinder of
High Flyer
torque and swerve, pulsing its aft nuke jet, spinning, a grand waltz set to the tune of circumstance—and it worked. Nuggets of primordial metal and rock arced past and never struck, spinning by in curves hut never hitting solid. One of them sheared off an aft antenna, but there were backups. Plenty.

Wiseguy said calmly, “I find urgent traffic at high frequencies. The focus is one called Forceful, the source of these…pellets, as they call them.”

Shanna said, “They’re as big as continents, so why not? Flicking goddamn spitballs at us.”

“And here’s ours,” Chow-Lin said tersely.

Tumbling rocks, three of them. Fast spectroscopy showed them to be mostly iron.

“Good conductors,” Jordin said. “Easier for a magnetic slingshot to get a grip on.”

Proserpina
was smaller and so easier to turn. Since the incoming bullets were from a single source, they could make one rotation, to align the ship’s cylinder with the rocks. Then they used attitude jets—magnetic nozzles affixed to the larger exhaust nozzle—to push the ship sideways.

It was touch and go. The burst of rocks came speeding in over a twenty-minute interval, tense seconds ticking by as
Proserpina
surged and rumbled. Viktor had shown them how. He sent hoarse, quick suggestions. Every hand fell to, doing calculations, checking on firing sequences. They barely had time to suit up for possible decompression.

“Not that it’ll make much difference,” Shanna said. “If something that big hits us, it’ll take out entire decks.”

Here was where Shanna’s insistence on maintenance paid off.
High Flyer
came under attack again. Both ships were alive with cross talk.

Then it was over. No more salvos against either ship. They stood tensely and listened for radar pings. Nothing.

Wiseguy said in the silence, “The Beings send signals of concern.”

It was not funny, but they all laughed.

Even in a crisis there is maintenance. Julia found doing routine jobs calming, and in the hours after their game of Dodgeball With Beings, she needed that. One of Julia’s tasks was regulating waste disposal. She had actually volunteered for it, recalling the first Mars expedition.

By the time they had reached Mars encounter, they had over a ton of “human waste,” which meant mostly dung. Rather
than use up fuel landing it, Viktor wanted to dump it.

The engineer, Raoul, had to do an EVA, anyway, to check out externals. First they had to blow the bolts to free the centrifugal-gravity cable. Away flew the snaky line and the empty upper stage they had used for the counterweight. They had watched the cylinder dwindle as the habitat abruptly went into zero gravity. The crescent of Mars hung in the distance, its bright pink hues a welcome touch of color after six months in the dead black of space.

Raoul went out with Viktor, carrying a hundred kilos of trash they could leave to interplanetary orbit for a few millennia. Julia and Marc, their geologist, trained the two external cameras on them. An estimated 100 million others were watching in real time from Earthside.

Raoul’s news from the Habitat Landing Module’s outside was good. No discernible damage to their exterior, and the water patch they’d had to make looked as though it was holding well. Raoul put another fresh layer on, hoping that would get them through the violence of aerobraking without another leak. Even if it didn’t, fresh water was waiting at the landing site, manufactured by the Gusev chem plant.

But before the adventure could start, they had to dump the dung—a ton of it. Julia had pulsed the line pressure in the waste system, pushing the solids farther into their plastic lining. Raoul and Viktor had to pull it out, helping the pressure at the other end. She recalled easing up the pressure, nice and smooth…

And it had stuck. Julia was doubly glad that Axelrod had vetoed live interior coverage of this part. The external cameras would give their audience a striking view, and who wanted to see crew just staring at dials? So had gone the argument.

So the subscribers did not get to watch Julia break out in a sweat. Viktor’s swearing did not help the basic indignity of the moment, either, so the Consortium monitors just edited it out. Which meant that Viktor said very little through the whole high drama.

They got it free after an hour of aggravating labor. Raoul had tied it off with a huge twist-it. Grunting, the two shoved it overboard. They pulled the gray plug straight out of the cylindrical waste tube, an unpleasant analogy.

When Viktor did their burn to enter the upper atmosphere, the ton of dung had continued on into interplanetary space.

Ah, nostalgia. Now Julia simply popped the valve on their disposal system, which blew it directly out into space. Nothing jammed, because they had plenty of overpressure. Modern conveniences! She could scarcely believe how far deep-space engineering had come. In two decades she had moved from a Porta Potti tugboat to a nuclear fusion
Queen Mary.

A
day after the bombardment Julia and Viktor opened the vid from Praknor. The woman was terse, but something in her eyes betrayed confusion.

“We’re getting all sorts of activity in four vents, especially Vent R. I’ve pulled teams out, for safety. We’re monitoring with cameras and instruments alone.”

Pictures of vapor layered in the air near the Marsmat. Currents ran in the walls, measured by meters. “Spectrum analysis of the currents shows complex patterns, but we can’t seem to make sense of them. There are even a few of these—”

An image taken at night at the Vent R opening. High up, the stars were sharp, but vapor poured from the broad vent mouth and blurred those on the horizon. A pale shaft of light played up through the mist, a cone opening to the sky. It pulsed in a long, slow rhythm.

“Several vents do this now, about once a week. I read your early reports about one beam of light from Vent A, but not seen again. This seems to be a repeat of that, but now far more often, and from other sites. Clearly we are witnessing some new manifestations. Perhaps attempts to directly communicate with us? Or with other mat sites around the planet? Judging from the increased electrical current levels, there may be a general rise in mat response.” Praknor paused, looking at the camera with concern. “The geologists have found that those currents are driven by piezoelectric effects—that is, by rock layers responding to pressure. How this ties to the Marsmat is far from obvious. What makes the pressure? I am sending by tightbeam several papers written about this and submitted to Earthside journals, principally to Nature, perhaps for a special issue.”

Praknor’s hesitant manner cut off, and she concluded, lips a thin pale line, “Any comments on this work would be sincerely appreciated by us all.”

Viktor turned it off and sat staring at the screen. “Wish I was there.” Julia said softly, “Me, too.”

They were kept busy monitoring Wiseguy’s talk with the Beings, trying to penetrate the aliens’ snarled syntax and layered meanings. “Like Mandarin Chinese,” Viktor said, then admitted that he had only heard it was a mannered, opaque tongue.

In came another vid from Axelrod. “More Mandarin corporate-speak,” Julia muttered, but took a break and watched the vid. A mistake. Within minutes after Axelrod’s greetings and cheerleading she was fuming.

“Hey,” Axelrod said, “I had this crazy idea. Sure we want Darksiders, the tech that makes them, the works. Plenty market there in space fabrication. But…what if we could bring some zand—small ones, of course—back to the moon for, uh, study?”

“Study?” she yelled at the screen. “You want a goddamn zoo for the tourists! But they’re sentient!”

“—can cool it down for them, like those penguin exhibits at zoos Earthside, then maybe pump up the atmosphere so they could fly around. Pluto on the moon! I’ve tried this on the ISA people and they’re okay with it, but Shanna, well, she’s kinda emotional lately. Anyway, you should think about it. You gotta do some more work on what they eat so we know what to feed—”

She hit the pause switch, blood boiling.
Good old Axelrod! He’d have made a fine Victorian explorer, stuffing natives into cages!

And Shanna had reacted just as she did, probably. Julia blinked. Maybe they were more alike than she had thought.

F
ORCEFUL WAS ADAMANT
.

Chill said wanly,

Sunless said,

Chill sent fretful undertones.

Forceful rebuked the shrunken Being with,

Sunless said,

Mirk asked in derision.

To underline the implication, Sunless let its notes trail into the background noise of distant conversations.

Forceful said,

Mirk paused, silky striations running through it, then got the idea.

J
ULIA PUT
E
ARTHSIDE
,
ISA, and the Consortium out of her mind—they were sending indigestible messages that would have taken all her time just to read—and fretted. While Jordin and Shanna worked with Wiseguy, they put the whole rest of the crew to work methodically checking all the ship’s systems. If another attack came, they had to be ready for new methods.
Prepare for the unexpected…

But what? Zeus hurling lightning bolts? No, that they’d already done, killing Veronique. Shotgun blasts of rocks, wide enough so they couldn’t dodge? She didn’t like to think of that, because there seemed no defense. She talked to Viktor, and he suggested that if the faction now called the Outbounds wanted to, they could push against the ship itself.

“Tumble us, maybe even break us in half.” He blinked owlishly.

“You really think so?”

“They use magnetic pressure, and we’re a big cylinder of metal.” He shrugged and raised his eyebrows, a picture of Slavic fatalism.

“Gee, you’re a real morale booster.”

“You asked. We are mice among elephants.”

“And just hope they don’t learn to dance?”

“Is dangerous out here.”

“Looks like time to bring in the diplomats.”

“And we have none. Shanna, she is no diplomat.”

Julia grinned. “No kidding. We’re still barely getting along. Yet we’re supposed to deal with invisible aliens the size of the Earth.”

“Back on Mars we had mat that may be one connected organism. So was big, and we didn’t understand.” He spread his hands. “This is similar, yes?”

“Ummm. Maybe… It’s still alien communication. And with Wiseguy it’s plenty easier than the decades we spent trying to sense what the Marsmat was about.”

“Is true. Maybe time to become better friends with Wiseguy. Not that it seems very wise, no.”

So Julia and Viktor met in the dayroom with
High Flyer
and
Proserpina
Wiseguys linked and in attendance—which meant they had a lot of Wiseguy’s running time allotted to them—and worked through the fat file of Being signals. Jordin and Mary Kay attended over comm link. Most they could throw away as just plain too hard to understand. Let the next generation of data hounds mine it for their theses. In a sly gesture of revenge Julia sent the entire file Earthside, just to let them know what it was like to get buried under digital files.

The latest attack had been reviewed by the Beings. A faction they called the Outbounds—Forceful and Sunless, plus others—had thrown the rocks at them. Something called Recorder solemnly intoned that the offending Beings had been penalized by “involuntary induced subtraction.”

“Ummm,” Julia said. “Off with their heads?”

Jordin said carefully, “I think it’s more like a little finger.”

“For trying to kill us?” Viktor demanded.

“Even a little finger hurts,” Jordin said reasonably.

Julia and Mary Kay had been trawling semi-independently through the massive intercept files. They had Wiseguy group and sort the identity tags, based on time and position of their transmissions.
Even Zeus lived in a society…
Julia laid them out on-screen.