IronStar (4 page)

The
Arvida-Yee
fell inward
at 20 percent lightspeed, dropping like a stone thrown from Kirrah’s last
course change, passive sensors alive. No grav signature, no emissions at all, a
mote lost in the millions of objects small and large scattered through the
immense volume around a star. An even smaller mote, her drone sped on ahead,
gradually widening the distance between them. Three more hours passed.

After several hopeful offers to
relieve Lieutenant Finch, Ensign Sara Roe surrendered to seniority and settled
herself into the sofa in front of the Rec-room’s repeater viewtank, with the
other off-shifters. Now that everyone was fully awake, no one wanted to miss
First Approach.

“Whoops, there’s another rock, no,
it’s too close-in, just a big moon really, almost lost it in the stellar disc…”
Lieutenant Finch muttered, almost to herself. “Two smallish asteroid belts,
one’s just a big arc…” Everyone watched the big display, as a new solar system
built itself in the viewtank out of stray glimmers in the night outside.

Twenty more minutes passed. Two
more smallish iceworlds, far out and bizarrely orbiting one another; a few more
asteroids; a small system of moons resolve around each gas giant.

“In ten minutes the drone will pass
over the star’s north pole, we’ll get a look at…wait one, what’s
this
?”
Doris’s rising voice brought everyone’s attention to the auxiliary display as
effectively as any alarm bell.

“Oh,
my
!” she breathed, as a
small blue-green spark swam into view, hidden until then by the sun. Kirrah
felt her heart beating faster…
from this far, life is almost always blue
.
Rapt, the crew watched the scan data for the new planet blossoming on various
readouts: dayside temperature 291 Kelvins - moderate, life-friendly; diameter
13,500 km; spectral analysis… nitrogen, yes, oxygen 19 percent, water… water
vapor,
yes! Life!
They had found a living world!

“Ok, ladies and gentlemen, stay at
your stations, the show isn’t over,” said Captain Leitch. “Let’s keep sharp,
and let Eyes do her job.”
Yeah, sure
, thought Kirrah,
we’ve just
found a whole new planet, with who-knows-what on it, and coincidentally we’re
all going to become rich from royalties, and we’re supposed to sit here and act
professional? Yes, that’s exactly what we’re going to do
, she reminded
herself firmly,
because that’s what we are. Another hour gathering data
isn’t going to make this whole beautiful planet go away.

“Now we’re getting readings on
ship’s sensors,” Lieutenant Finch pointed out. “Looks like 7 percent above
standard gravity, that moon the drone spotted has two little sisters, one quite
close and one farther out… makes for an interesting night sky, I bet.”

“Looks like our drone will pass the
large moon pretty closely,” observed Ensign Roe over shipcom, still forward in
CrewRec.

“Yes,” agreed Lieutenant Finch,
“Just by luck, we should get pretty good mineral readouts on the first pass.”
The drone’s extra kick from the railgun had carried it almost 250,000
kilometers ahead of the
Arvida-Yee
, which would put it over the planet
first, then over the largest moon about as the Survey ship passed high above
the northern hemisphere of the planet.

The next fifty minutes unscrolled
like a travelogue. Details of solar luminance, spectra, sunspot activity
competed with the spectacular views from the main scope as they passed through
the heart of the system. Solar prominences flared majestic around the star; a
wind of particles swept through the inner system causing aurorae at both poles
of the nearer gas giant planet; asteroids danced their age-old dance; and
ahead, growing larger and more distinct with every passing minute, shimmered the
planet –
their
planet, as Kirrah now thought of it.

“Hey, Cap, aren’t we going to get a
closer look?” asked Lieutenant Foley. At this speed and heading, they would
pass far above the planet and be back in deep space in a few more hours.

“Hoping for some LGM’s to study?”
jibed Jerry Sykes’ soft voice, also over the shipcom. “Another ‘lost colony’ to
trade beads and write theses about?” Angela Foley’s love of exploration, and
somewhat romantic interpretation of the presence of a half-dozen primitive but very
human races discovered in this direction, occasionally led to good-natured
kidding from some of the harder-edged crewmembers, whose duties were
circumscribed by physics rather than anthropology.

“All right, Angela. Any more Kruss
in the system have had plenty of time to react to our engagement back there.
Let’s take a look. But first, Guns, I want a mailtube released on deadman
protocol, 200-hour delay, totally passive and ballistic, full sensor download.
We can take chances, people, but not with what we’ve found. Report on launch.
Helm, stand by, no action ‘til launch.”

“Aye, Sir,” said Sammy Lee at the
weapons board. “Setting it up… ballistic for 200 hours at 0.2c, that would put
it out at… two hundred eighty-nine AU before activation.”

“Helm standing by,” said Lieutenant
Roehl.
God, how paranoid
is
the Captain, anyway? …oh yeah, just as
paranoid as he should be. I forget sometimes, he carries the whole caravan
.
Another minute passed.

Thunk-clunk
. “Mailtube
away!” sang Sammy.

“Ok, Helm, let’s see what we’ve
got. Activate Tubedrive, bring us in to a planetary diameter over the north
pole, a nice round orbit, and we’ll make a few maps.”

“Aye, Cap, lighting drive!” Kirrah
was sure the big smile on her face would show in her voice, which was becoming,
she realized, part of the permanent record which future colonists would no
doubt place in their central library.

“Eyes, what’s the preliminary
mineral survey on that large moon?”

“Ummm, pending, Cap,” said
Lieutenant Finch from her position at the main sensor board. “The drone is just
passing it now, I’ll have data for you as soon as we unTube over …the planet.”
That
little verbal hesitation
, thought Kirrah –
we, well, actually Captain
Leitch, but we, this crew, gets to name this entire planet!
She reactivated
the Tubedrive for the first time in hours, swung the small ship into proper
alignment, engaged drive, and they plunged back into the warm dark of Tubespace
for the count of four heartbeats. Then, like a bubble popping, the Siderial
universe burst back onto their sensors.

“On target, orbit achieved in one,
Cap!”

“Damn, we’re good!” said Captain
Leitch, smiling at her, and drinking in the crew’s sheer joy at being alive.

What a glorious sight! The planet
lay beneath them, filling a quarter of their sky. Hard white snow and ice
reflected sunlight in sparkles from a smallish polar cap, surrounded by broad
deep-blue oceans. Small islands and a sharp peninsula decorated the visible
hemisphere, and a narrow continent snaked southward around the dayside limb. A
white gash through the dark blue-green landmass suggested snowy mountain
ranges… also on two of the islands, snowcaps; probably glaciers. And lakes!
They had freshwater lakes!

At least two were visible from
here, and far to the south, near the equator, the continent widened.
Anti-spinward, west of the mountains, the land color changed to a lighter,
yellower green, and across the mountains, a dull red-brown desert. White fluffy
clouds spread across the western ocean; to the east, a huge circular cloudmass
crossed the line of sunset; hurricanes, even! Tears stung her eyes; Kirrah had
not noticed how she missed the sight of her own homeworld, so much like this
from space. After surveying so many lifeless rocks, how beautiful it was to see
life again.
Doris must be in sensor-heaven
, thought Kirrah, as she put
her board on standby and glanced across at her shipmate…

Who was staring in wide-eyed horror
at her Sensor board, her hand already descending, for the second time that day,
on the General Quarters alarm. Stunned, Kirrah’s fingers brought her own board
hot by sheer spinal reflex, as the GQ alarm blatted across every other
conversation.

Lieutenant Finch stammered “S-sir!
The drone! It’s
gone!
”

“Guns! Launch all ready Spit-5’s!
Medium spread!
Now
!” snapped the Captain. “Helm! Take us up-Tube!
Stat!
”
Reacting as much to the urgency in Captain Leitch’s voice as any understanding
of what was happening, Lieutenant Roehl and Master Chief Lee fed commands to
their boards. As the Tubedrive generator spooled up, a thuk-clang-clang-clang-clang
reverberation announced the launch of four of their diminishing supply of
missiles - at what, Kirrah couldn’t guess… the missiles could be recovered
later, she knew. Her finger stabbed for the Drive Activate key…

  
- The proximity alarm pinged wildly…

  
- Doris reached for the Query key on her board…

  
- Sammy Lee touched the keys to reload the ready-tubes with more
missiles from the bow magazine…

  
- Captain William Leitch’s eyes turned to the main display, where a red
line sprouted suddenly, impossibly close to the green cursor marking the
Arvida-Yee
’s
position…

  
- In the CrewRec, Lieutenant Angela Foley and Lieutenant Commander
Howell Docking reached at the same moment for the screen controls, to magnify
the view of their beautiful new hablet…

Fierce blue and white light flashed
briefly, like multiple flashbulbs going off behind her, and something
whacked
Kirrah across the back, at the same instant a dragon drew in a deep breath to
roar… the planet, she could see the
planet
, right where her board was,
how could that be… it was spinning away, no,
she
was spinning away…
pieces of
ship
were spinning away… sound was gone, her ears hurt
abominably. Another flash… the light was spinning… disappearing in a shrinking
circle like the bright mouth of a tunnel as she plunged backward into its dark
interior… Her last thought, as anoxia sucked her consciousness away, was “
This
is so
wrong
! Death is supposed to be a tunnel of
light
! Ahh,
Kirrah, a critic to the very end…
”

Silence.

“Do you wish to have love? If
you wish to have love, then you must leave love.” -
 
Mechtild of Magdeburg, 13
^th
century AD mystic and nun; Germany, Terra

Drifting up from just below the
surface of consciousness, Kirrah became aware, dimly at first, as though
approaching her sense of hearing from a distance, of the sound of voices. The
same familiar inner voices that had inhabited her dreams and thoughts all her
life, but now speaking as they wished, entirely free, apparently, of her
conscious control:

…and so, gentlemen of the Board, (
said
a male voice from somewhere… it’s hard to tell, when you don’t seem to have a
body…
) You can see that by her culpable inattention to duty, and
inexcusably laggard performance of her Captain’s last command to Engage Drive,
Lieutenant Kirrah Roehl is personally responsible for the loss of her ship with
all hands.

Audio, we’ve only got audio,
where’s the damned video feed?

So, what was it got them, then?
(asked a different, more kindly voice, not unlike her Aunt Risa’s)

…objection, immaterial! They’re all
dead! Next witness! (
Geez, that first voice was familiar too… and where was
the damned video! Ahh, there we are…

Pictures: slowmo, so painfully
slow. The kinder voice again: Look, Kirrah, there’s the rip actually opening in
the floor of the bridge, see: you really
can
see the planet between your
knees. No, there’s no time to see the other crew, these memories are limited to
where you happened to be looking at the time. But there, and there; see the
bright red flecks in the air, just part of the general debris sucking out the
massive rent in the hull; a stylus, spinning lazily end over end; pieces of
cabling; dust, tsk tsk, who would have thought there was so much
dust
; a
food wrapper someone lost a month ago; yes dear, that is someone’s hand and
part of their forearm, not Doris’s, judging by its light color; another stylus;
a whole intact First Aid kit (we won’t be needing that here, now will we?); a
wristcomp, trailing something red and stringy; two empty caffi bulbs;
unidentified bits of optronics, so bright and glittery; along with all the air,
all the sweet, people-smelling, lunch-aroma-lingering, warm, homey air - look,
you can see crystals forming already as it hits hard vacuum, so cold; and one
last bit of flotsam cast into the unending dark, that’s you, my dear…

Me? what?

More? You want more? I suppose
there’s no harm in that, we’ve got the time. It’s a joke, dear… a little humor.
Ok, let's run the next memory, there’s about a second and a half missing, you
did hit your head rather hard on the coaming as you went out. That’s all right,
don’t feel badly… ahh, here we are…

Pictures: slowmo again, and an
intense itch on her forehead; blackness swimming out of a dark red haze, a
blackness with stars in it… space: raw, naked space, 11,000 kilometers give or
take, over the polar ice cap of her beautiful new planet... the feeling of
tears with that thought, but no actual tears, nothing seems to
be
there,
no body. Swinging slowly, left to right, the ship comes into view. Not the
ship, surely, the ship was …smoother, yes, definitely smoother than that jumble
of metal and, and …
things
. Oh God, and there’s the drive collar, what’s
left of it, around the bow, and there’s the port gravitics array, where’s the
starboard one…
guhhh!
There
is
no starboard side, just a massive
rent, hullmetal peeled back like a food wrapper, you can see right into the Rec
room,
heeheehee
the wreck room, the …
Turn it off! Please TURN IT OFF!
There are… things, floating in the ripped-open Rec room,
things
that
brought me my last lunch,
things
that I played Chess with last offshift,
that I…