Polaris (2 page)

One hour, eight minutes after it had vanished into the inferno, the dwarf reappeared. It had plowed directly through the sun,
sailed
through, according to the experts on the other ships, like a rock going through fog. The solar stream that had reached out toward it during its approach had collapsed back into the turbulence, and a new one was forming on the opposite side, dragged out of the dying star by the enormous gravity. Then a titanic explosion obscured the view.

“I'm closing the viewports,”
said Maddy.
“You'll have to settle for watching the feeds now. If it goes prematurely, we don't want anyone blinded.”

Dunninger napped. And even Mendoza. Nancy White looked tired. She'd tried to get some rest during the day, but it didn't matter. Circadian rhythms were what they were, and it happened that ship time coincided with Andiquar time, so it really was close to 4:00
A
.
M
. She had taken something to stay awake. Boland didn't know what it was, but he knew the symptoms.

Boland was startled by the tug of the ship's engines. Madeleine appeared briefly at the door to report that it was getting “a little bit hot outside,” and she was going to withdraw to a safer distance. “Everybody belt down.”

They secured Mendoza and Dunninger without waking them. And then Boland settled into his own harness.

Incredibly, it didn't seem as if the dwarf had even slowed down. It was still dragging the entrails of the sun behind it. The scene reminded Boland of a cosmic taffy pull.

The senior expert on stellar collisions was on the
Sentinel.
He'd predicted that the sun would collapse during the course of the event. Final demolition would occur, he said, when the various forces generated by the passage of the dwarf had time to penetrate the outer layers. Delta Karpis was more massive than their home sun by about a quarter, more massive than Sol by a third.

Maddy piped in the voice of one of the experts from the
Rensilaer
:
“Any minute now.”

They woke Mendoza and Dunninger.

“It's starting to go,” said Klassner. “What you'll see first is a general collapse.” Moments later, that character-switch came over him, and he was someone else. He looked first puzzled, then sleepy. Boland watched his eyelids sag. Within minutes, Klassner was asleep.

What they saw first was a bright white light that blew all the pictures off the monitors. Somebody inhaled, but no one spoke. Mendoza, seated beside Klassner, looked toward Boland, and their eyes locked. Boland knew Mendoza well. They'd been friends a long time, but something deeper passed between them in that moment, as if they were comrades standing on a dark shore.

They jumped out past the orbit of the fifth planet, to a prearranged location, where they rejoined the other ships. Klassner woke during the jump and looked devastated when they told him it was over. “You slept through it, Marty,” said Mendoza. “We tried to wake you, but you were seriously out.”

“It's okay,” White told him. “You'll get another chance.” From this
range, the explosion hadn't occurred yet, was still forty minutes away, and the researchers were able to set up and wait for the event to happen again. Klassner swallowed his disappointment, and commented that his daughter wouldn't be a bit surprised when he told her what had happened. Boland understood that Klassner had no children.

From their present range, Delta Karpis would normally have been a relatively small disk. But the disk was gone, replaced by a yellow smear twisted into the shape of a pear.

Nancy White was sitting with a notebook, recording her impressions, as if she would one day publish them. Her reputation had come from creating and moderating a series of shows,
Nancy White's Fireside Chats,
in which she talked science and philosophy with her audience; and
Time-Out,
a panel discussion that allowed her to sit each week with simulated historical figures ranging from Hammurabi to Adrian Cutter to Myra Kildare to discuss the issues of the day. The show had never been enormously popular, but—as the producers liked to say—the people who counted loved it.

Urquhart talked quietly with Mendoza. Dunninger had opened a book but wasn't really paying any attention to it.

They counted down, and it all happened again. Except at this range it was less painful to watch. The pear buckled, and the light coming through the viewports alternately brightened and darkened. And finally subsided into a hostile red glow.

It was odd, living through an event twice. But that was what FTL did for you. When you could outrun light, you could travel in time.

Within two hours, Delta Karpis was gone, and the light in the solar system had gone out. Only a blaze of luminous gas, and the bright golden ring around the dwarf, remained. They watched while the neutron star proceeded quietly on its way.

Rondel (Rondo) Karpik was chief of the communications watch at Indigo Station, near the outer limits of Confederate space. His title,
chief,
was largely nominal since, except during major operations, he was the only
person on the watch. The Delta Kay mission had ceased to be a major operation. Sensor packages had been laid at strategic points, data from the three ships had been relayed and stored, the on-station experts had expressed their admiration for the efficiency with which the researchers had carried out their assigned tasks, but they were predicting it would be months before we knew what we'd learned. There had been a journalist with the
Sentinel,
reporting to a pool. The pool had filed stories that went on about the majesty of it all until Rondo thought he was going to throw up. Then the fleet had announced its homebound schedule, and the experts and journalists had retired down to Cappy's gumpo shop, and he hadn't seen them since.

There was still some tracking data coming in, and a few other odds and ends, but the excitement was clearly over. Well, he had to admit he'd never seen a star blow up before, at least not from close by.

“Indigo, we're ready to make our jump.”
Bill Trask's image gazed at him from the center of the room. Bill was captain of the
Rensilaer
and, in Rondo's view, the biggest horse's ass among the assorted skippers who passed through Indigo. He had no time for peasants, and he let you know exactly how you rated. He was big, ponderous, with white hair and a deep, gravelly voice, and everybody was afraid of him. At least all the communications people.
“We estimate timely arrival Indigo. Keep the stewpots warm.”

The message had been sent fifteen hours earlier. Trask signed off, and his image vanished.

Rondo opened a channel but kept it audio only. “Acknowledge,
Rensilaer,
” he said. “We'll be looking for you.”

All three ships would, of course, stop there before proceeding to Rimway. Indigo was a cylinder world, orbiting Planter's Delight, which had been settled less than thirty years before and already boasted 17 million inhabitants. Indigo had almost half a million more.

The past few days had been historic, but it was hard to get excited. He was up for a department manager's job, and that was all he cared about at the moment. Events like this were a hazard. They were no-win situations. Handle them right, and nobody would notice. Screw up somewhere, say the wrong thing to one of the journalists, and it would be
bye-bye baby. So he concentrated on maintaining a professional attitude. Keep the experts happy. And make sure the assorted hyperlight transmissions were received in good order, made available, and relayed to Rimway. It was simple enough. All he really had to do was to let the AI handle the details, be on his best social behavior, say good things about everybody, and keep close in case of a problem.

He watched the
Rensilaer
's status lights, and when they went blue, he informed operations that the ship had made its jump, and he gave them its ETA.

Ten minutes later, the
Sentinel
's captain appeared, Eddie Korby, young, quiet, studious. Look at him and you thought he was timid. The last person in the world you'd think would be piloting a starship. But he always had an attractive woman on his arm. Sometimes two or three.

“Indigo,”
he said,
“we'll be departing in four minutes. I hope you got to watch the show. Delta Kay literally imploded. The passengers seem pretty happy with the mission. See you in a couple of weeks.
Sentinel
out.”

Next up was Maddy.
“Coming home, Rondo,”
she said.
“Departure imminent.”
Behind her, on his operational screen, the dying star gave her an aura. She looked positively supernatural, standing there, silhouetted against the conflagration. A first-class babe, she was. But there was something about her that warned him
don't touch. “
Polaris
out.”

He took another sip of his gumpo, which was an extract from a plant grown on the world below, and to which he'd long since become accustomed. Lemon with a sting, but when it settled, it provided a general sense of warmth and well-being.

Sentinel
's status lamps went blue. On her way.

He passed it on, not that anyone in Ops really cared, but it was procedure. He checked the logbook, made the entry for the
Sentinel,
and waited for
Polaris
's lights to change.

The lamps showed white when the ship was in linear space, and they would go to blue when she'd made her jump. Twenty minutes after Maddy said they were ready to leave, they were still white.

That shouldn't be. “Jack,” he told the AI, “run a diagnostic on the board. Let's make sure the problem's not at this end.”

The systems whispered to one another, status lamps winked on and off, turned yellow, turned green, went back to white.
“I do not detect any problem with the system, Rondo,”
said Jack.

Damn. He disliked complications. He waited another few minutes, but the lamp remained steadily, defiantly, unchanged.

White.

He hated problems. Absolutely hated them. There was always a big hassle, and it usually turned out that somebody had fallen asleep. Or hadn't thrown a switch. Reluctantly, he informed operations.

“
Polaris
twenty-five minutes after scheduled jump. Unaccounted for.”

Rondo's supervisor, Charlie Wetherall, showed up a few minutes later. Then one of the techs, who'd heard what was happening. The tech ran tests, and said the problem was at the other end. At forty-five minutes, the first journalists arrived. Heard something was happening. What's wrong?

Rondo kept quiet and let Charlie do the talking. “These things happen,” Charlie said. “Communications breakdowns.” Sure they do.

What Rondo couldn't figure was why they hadn't heard from Maddy if she'd been unable to jump.

“Busted link,” said Charlie, helpfully, using his expression to suggest that Rondo not say anything alarming to the journalists. Or to anyone at all.

“Then you don't think they're in trouble?” one of them asked. Her name was Shalia Something-or-other. She was a dark-skinned woman who'd sulked for weeks because they hadn't made room for her on the mission.

“Hell, Shalia,” said Charlie, “for the moment we just have to wait until we have more information. But no, there's nothing to be worried about.”

He ushered the journalists into a conference room and found someone to stay with them, talk to them, keep them happy. He promised to let them know as soon as the station heard from the
Polaris.

Charlie was small and round. He had a short temper when people made mistakes that impacted on him, and he was obviously thinking that Maddy had screwed up somehow, and he was getting irritated with her.
Better with her, Rondo thought, than with
me.
Back in the comm center, they replayed the
Polaris
transmission. It was audio only.
“Coming home, Rondo. Departure imminent.
Polaris
out.”

“Doesn't tell us much,” said Charlie. “What's
imminent
mean?”

“Not an hour.”

“Okay. I'm going to check with upstairs. Stand by.”

Ten minutes later he was back with the station's director of operations. By then there was a crowd, and the journalists, who had broken out of their holding cell, were back. The director promised to make a statement as soon as he had something, and assured everyone it was just a technical glitch.

They played Maddy's transmission over and over. The director confessed he had no idea what the situation might be and asked Charlie whether anything like this had happened before. It had not.

“Give it another hour,” the director said. “If nothing changes by”—he consulted the time—“by five, we'll send somebody in. Can we turn one of the other two ships around?”

Charlie consulted his display. “Negative,” he said. “Neither has enough fuel to make a U-turn.”

“Who else is out there?”

“Nobody who's close.”

“Okay. Who's not close?”

Rondo tapped the screen to show his boss. “Looks like Miguel,” said Charlie.

Miguel Alvarez was the captain of the
Rikard Peronovski.
Carrying supplies to Makumba and running some sort of AI tests.