Day of the Dragonstar (16 page)

TRYING TO EXPEND
purely nervous energy, Colonel Phineas Kemp sat at his command console and punched up another complete set of calculations for the trip. Then he’d do a maintenance check, he thought, sipping at coffee as figures and diagrams began to blink onto his readout screen.

He sure as hell was going to make sure
this
expedition was successful, he mused, ignoring the activities of the other members of the crew.

Looking like a floating petroleum refinery, the
Goddard,
with its improbable configuration of spheres and superstructure, had just accelerated from lunar orbit on its intercept course with the
“Dragonstar.
Phineas
Kemp had not been pleased when Marcia Bertholde had coined the term for the alien starship. He preferred the more functional title of Artifact One. However, the more lyrical, romantic minds had prevailed. To them,
Dragonstar
was so beautifully apt a name for the alien ship. Even before the
Goddard was
launched, the new code name had been almost universally accepted.

Like the
Goddard’
s smaller counterpart ships, the Outer Planets Probeship was equipped with Ludodyanov ram-impulse engines. Constantly accelerating at about one Earth gravity, the
Goddard
would achieve a velocity in the neighborhood of three million kilometers per hour before decelerating and matching the ever-increasing orbital velocity of the
Dragonstar.

Phineas Kemp had installed himself as Mission Commander of the
Goddard’s
voyage. He had supervised the crew selection and every detail of the mission plan. Although the primary objective would be to commandeer the
Dragonstar
and bring it into a stable L-5 orbit, he had acceded to the requests of the joint Directors to include several paleontologists and biologists (shuttled up quickly from Earth) so that some preliminary studies could be made of the specimen-jar environment of the Earth’s early ages. He could understand the excitement and desire on the biologists’ parts, but the real importance of the
Dragonstar
was what was hanging off the ass-end of the ship—engines which had carried it to Earth’s solar system from God-knew-where. Light-years distant, to be sure, and Phineas could hardly wait to have IASA’s engineers crawling over the innards of that ship. The secrets waiting for humankind were immeasurable, and, thought Phineas, whoever it was who bestowed such a gift on the world would be forever remembered . . .

But there he was thinking of his damned ego again. Would he ever get out from beneath the thumb of his father and the old man’s expectations? It was times like this that made him doubt it.

There
was
another reason why Phineas has assumed command of the
Goddard.
It was a reason he had shared with no one, and rarely himself. Rebecca Thalberg. Plain and simple, there was part of him that considered the voyage a rescue mission because he refused to believe that she was dead. The logical part of his mind kept telling him that as long as there had been no positive verification that she had been killed in the initial havoc (and there had
not
been) he would continue to believe that she might have escaped. The thought of never seeing Becky again troubled him in his conscious mind and in his dreams, and he cursed himself to realize that it required a tragedy of this proportion to make him
see,
to make him
feel.

And so, even though he had selected his crew for the primary objective—twenty engineers and EV A riggers, plus the three paleontologists—Phineas still had twelve (including himself) highly-trained astronauts with planetary exploration experience. Twelve physically and mentally tough men and women who could form a small, extremely capable expeditionary force. Phineas dreamed of leading them, armed with sophisticated weaponry and survival gear, through the interior of the
Dragonstar
in search of Becky.

He would certainly have the time for it, he thought. Once the initial surveys and preliminary explorations had been conducted, and the out-rigger engines had been attached to the alien vessel’s hull, there would be plenty of time for extracurricular activity. It would be a long trip back to lunar orbit, and everyone would, need something to keep himself occupied. Mikaela Lindstrom, the chief paleontologist from the Institute for Biological and, Paleontological Research, and her two assistants, would be busy with their dinosaurs. Robert Jakes, the chief engineer, and his men would keep tabs on their juryrigged tugboat operation. Phineas would be providing security for the rest of the crew, planning a search and examination of the alien crew quarters, and perhaps sending out a few exploratory teams.

If Becky was alive, he would find her.

He finished his coffee and examined the readouts again.

* * *

The
Goddard
accelerated through the emptiness of space, her computers constantly reassessing her position in comparison to that of the
Dragonstar,
and guiding it into an oscillating trajectory that would sweep in grandly alongside the giant alien vessel. The weeks passed quickly for the crew as they prepared for a quick, well-coordinated assault on the spinning cylinder. Phineas Kemp conducted briefing sessions and contingency-plan meetings at regular intervals. The crew was bombarded with every scrap of information known about the
Dragonstar
until every man and woman knew the vessel and their job connected with it as well as they knew their most secret thoughts. There would be no screw-ups this time around. Three strikes and you’re out, Kemp had told them, and it was time for a home run.

As the
Goddard
closed in on its target, Kemp had all of the crew as excited and anxious to get moving as a high school football team the night before the Thanksgiving Day game.

All except one.

His name was Ross Canter. He was one of Doctor Jakes’s Assistant Flight Engineers. Tall, thin, and somewhat emaciated looking, Canter was considered one of the best men in his chosen profession. He had a slightly Mediterranean aspect, a fact which he attributed to his mixed parentage of Israeli and Irish, which was borne out by the fax sheet in his Security Clearance file.

That information was, of course, incorrect.

Ross Canter, whose real name was Pierre Rassim, was a member of the Third World Confederation’s Intelligence Division—known simply as the
Jiha
—although
his contacts with his superiors since joining the IASA fifteen years ago had been extremely infrequent. He was part of a vast community of global spies and agents whose existence was acknowledged by all participating countries and alliances, but whose individual identities were not always known. It was said that espionage was quite boring in the long run, and that it was not the pulse-quickening life described In popular films and novels. Ross Canter would agree with that completely. In his years of service to the
Jiha,
he had never been called upon to do anything, other than file his “progress reports” on a regular basis, which served only to allow his superiors to know that he was still alive. He often assumed that he was being watched, monitored so to speak, by other agents so that it could be known if he was being unconsciously swayed by the “other side,” but he had never been aware of any surveillance.

In actuality, Canter had to admit that the first place had been waning as he grew older. It was said that age makes more conservatives than speeches, and he tended to agree with the aphorism. As an engineer with IASA, he concluded that he would have been doing a similar function in the TWC, and that he loved his work as much as a man should. Therefore, he supposed it did not really matter which government he worked for, since he was in the long run, an engineer and not a spy.

The only factor, in fact, which had kept him loyal to the Third World Confederation was the kindnesses and story-telling abilities of an old man named Ahmad Nesrudah. Canter had been a small boy living with his parents in Beirut during the outbreak of the near-disastrous Oil War in 1998. The Lebanese city was practically Ieveled in the course of the action, and there were hundreds of thousands of war-orphans, of whom Canter was one of the more fortunate.

Ahmad Nesrudah had been an Iranian Oil Minister during one of that country’s various political/religious ruling regimes, but he had possessed the good sense to vacate the area before it became personally dangerous. When his wife and remaining children were killed during a series of surgical bombings, he set out to replace his family with an orphan son. Finding the young Pierre Rassim in a Unesco Center, Nesrudah adopted him and transported him to his private villa in a small Saudi town, where he was revered as a teacher. The boy grew up under the sharp and intelligent care of the old man. He was taught to trust no one but himself, to arm himself with knowledge, and to respect the ancient Arabian traditions.

Old Ahmad seemed to delight most in telling the boy stories of the Arab terrorist groups of the latter half of the twentieth century—a time when he had been more politically active himself. It was then that the Third World became recognized as a force to be dealt with, and it was only because of the glorious efforts of their ancestors. It was the first time in almost a thousand years that the noble culture which had its roots in the Ottoman Empire had raised itself and challenged the supremacy of the Europeans and the upstart Americans—mere children in the world of culture and antiquity.

Ross Canter/Rassim had loved the old man dearly, and had many times sworn to him that he would never betray the ideals in which he believed. After attending the University of Palestine, he entered the
Jiha,
and was sent to Chicago, where he began living his false identity, living the life of a secret agent, waiting for the moment when he might be called to serve the ideology of the TWC and the memory of old Ahmad Nesrudah.

The moment had finally arrived.

* * *

Phineas Kemp sat in the Command chair as the
Goddard
approached the long-awaited rendezvous. “This is Colonel Kemp on board the
Goddard.
Calling Commander Fratz . . . Come in . . .”

The radio crackled for a moment before Fratz’s voice came through. “Good afternoon, Colonel, we’ve been expecting you. Sorry that I don’t have anything to report . . . but things have been quiet since—”

“We figured as much, Commander. Stand by for docking . . . You can go to automatic any time now. Report to the Command cabin when you’re on board.”

“Yes sir . . . Docking procedure sequence starting now. Stand by
, Goddard.”

Once the smaller
Heinlein
had linked up with the larger ship, Kemp intended to have Fratz and Bracken pilot the
Goddard’
s landing module, since they were the only ones with anything one might call experience in landing upon the
Dragonstar.
Kemp wanted to waste no time in getting the mission under way, and had already assembled the first part of the team in the transport bay of the lander. He had been over the recordings Coopersmith and Bracken had completed on the alien batch opening sequences and the descriptions of the “ascent” to the surface of the inner world of the alien cylinder. Phineas planned to lead the first group of ten into the
Dragonstar
— their first objective to establish a secure base camp, and then begin disarming the defensive systems of the outer hull so that the engine-rigging could begin.

He looked at the impossibly large expanse of the alien ship through the main view screen and shook his head. Even though he had seen the VOR recordings uncountable times, and had watched the cylinder grow larger and larger as the
Goddard
approached, it was still difficult to accept how immense the thing was. Phineas’s ship was more than two hundred meters long, one of the biggest ships in the Deep-Space Division, and it was like a flea preparing to land on an elephant’s back in comparison. The
Goddard
was so close now, that that cylinder was no longer recognizable as a ship—its endless surface stretched in all directions like the surface of a medium-sized moon. The details of its hull stood out in the sharp relief of sunlight and shadow. Phineas sat watching the screen, thinking that this gigantic
thing
—this ship of monsters—would not beat him. It was his for the taking, and he would not fail.

“Excuse me, Colonel, but Fratz is on board now,” said the Assistant Flight Commander.

“Tell him to get up here on the double.”

Phineas looked back to the screen, trying to imagine what it would be like inside the
Dragonstar.
Until this moment, the thought of being frightened, or even apprehensive, had not touched him, but now as the moment grew nearer, he felt the bottom dropping out of his stomach. He wondered how
he
was going to hold up under the pressure.

Fratz entered the cabin just then, and Kemp was glad for the escape from his thoughts. He quickly briefed him on the landing procedures and gave Fratz a chance to offer any additional advice that might be helpful. After a short discussion of technique, both men left the cabin—Fratz to enter the Command chair of the landing module, Kemp to the transport bay.