So Starbridge Earth stayed where it was, the nearby gatehouse its only companion. In the darkness of the eternal night, their comps murmured to each other like an old married couple muttering in their sleep. Day after day, week after week, year after year, they dozed among the stars, waiting to be awakened.
And then, all of a sudden . . .
On a flatscreen within the gatehouse control room, a red light flashed. It blinked several times, the only source of illumination in the dark compartment, before it was replicated by other lights on other screens. A few seconds later, lines of type began to scroll down the screens, unread by human eyes yet nonetheless significant to the artificial intelligence that had stood vigil for nearly two decades. Within moments, various comps were roused from their diagnostic subroutines, each performing automatic procedures programmed in their memories; one comp was dead, its systems decayed beyond self-repair through years of disuse, but relays were hastily rerouted, and its chores were quickly assumed by its companions. In the meantime, the master AI performed the series of rapid and inhumanly complex calculations that only a quantum computer was capable of making without error.
Ten seconds after the first light glimmered on the comp screen, a command was sent to the starbridge. Deep inside the ring, comps responded to instructions they hadn’t received in decades. Zero-point energy generators stirred, sending power through the hundreds of miles of wires packed like ganglia inside the giant torus. Within moments, starbridge was fully awake, its interior quietly humming with anticipation.
Almost as an afterthought, the gatehouse AI sent a signal to the Moon. A brief and simple message, to be received by a comp within the space-traffic control station at Copernicus Centre. Yet the message went unheeded; the room was unoccupied at that particular moment, its most recent shift having gone to bed several hours earlier, and so the transmission from Starbridge Earth wasn’t noticed for quite some time, and even then only after a technician chanced to glance at the automatic logbook and spot an anomaly. By then, many other things had happened.
Light swirled within the center of the starbridge, quickly becoming a kaleidoscopic funnel opening into hyperspace. A brilliant flash from the depths of the wormhole, then a small vessel plunged forth from the spacetime rift.
Jorge opened his eyes, took a deep breath. His second jaunt through a starbridge hadn’t been as bad as his first, but he still wasn’t accustomed to its violence. This time, at least, McAlister hadn’t needed to warn him not to look when the
Mercator
went through the wormhole; Jorge still felt a touch of vertigo, but he knew that it would pass.
“Glad to see we got through,” he murmured.
“You didn’t think we would?” From the left side of the cockpit, McAlister gave him an amused glance. “Believe me, if this starbridge weren’t operational, we’d still be in orbit around Hjarr. There’s no way we could’ve made the jump.” He reached up to snap a couple of toggles on the overhead console. “I’m just surprised that it’s still functional. I would’ve bet that someone would have shut it down by now.”
“You didn’t say that before we left.”
“Didn’t want to jinx the mission.” The pilot gave his console a quick inspection, then turned his head toward the passenger compartment. “Everyone all right back there?”
“We’re fine,” Greg replied, raising his voice to be heard. “Just don’t do that again anytime soon, okay?”
McAlister laughed out loud, but Jorge was no longer paying attention. Through the cockpit windows, he caught sight of something that, until little more than a week ago, he never thought he’d see with his own eyes. Just off the port side was a broad, silver-grey crescent, its sunlit side marred by craters, rills, and vast basalt plains. The Moon . . . and beyond that, in the far distance, a blue-green orb, flecked with bands and swirls of white, that vaguely resembled Coyote save for its enormous oceans.
Earth.
He’d seen pictures of it throughout his life, but even though it was a world his father and grandparents had known well and told him about, somehow he’d always thought of it as a mythical place, no more a part of his daily experience than a bedtime story he’d heard in childhood. And yet there it was, as tangible as the seat in which he was sitting, more beautiful than he’d ever expected.
“Nice, huh?” McAlister murmured, and Jorge looked around to see that the pilot was following his gaze through the windows. “It’s been a while for me . . . but this is your first time, so I can only imagine what it’s like for you.”
“Uh-huh.” Jorge couldn’t think of anything else to say. Words failed him.
“Yeah, well . . . we’ve got a long way to go, so let’s get to work.” McAlister rested his left hand upon the keyboard between their seats and, studying the comp screens before him, began entering navigation coordinates. “Get on the com, see if you can pick up any chatter. Try the K
u
band . . . that’s the one most commonly used by local space traffic. Even if Vargas is right, and there’s no one on the gatehouse, someone must have noticed our arrival.”
Jorge nodded as he turned toward the communications panel. Switching the frequency finder to the appropriate channel, he slowly turned the knob first one way, then the other. Distant voices, rendered almost unintelligible by static, came through his headset, yet he heard nothing that sounded like a message being sent to an unknown spacecraft that had just emerged from the starbridge.
“Not getting anything,” he said. “At least, not anything that’s meant for us.”
“I’m not surprised,” Vargas said from behind them, and Jorge looked around to see that he’d left his seat to come forward. The former Union Astronautica pilot floated in midair behind him and McAlister, holding on to a ceiling rung as he gazed over their shoulders. “Even if the AI transmitted a signal to Copernicus, there’s only half a chance that anyone’s even listening.”
Jorge didn’t miss the irate expression on McAlister’s face. He clearly didn’t like to have passengers visit the cockpit uninvited, and Vargas even less so. Vargas was the mission’s guide, though, so there was little McAlister could say about his presence. “What, you think their traffic controllers are asleep or something?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it. There’s just not as many spacecraft out here as there used to be, and the ones that are follow pretty rigid schedules.” With his free hand, Vargas pointed to the local-time chronometer just below the center window: it read 0232 GMT. “That’s the wee hours of the morning at Copernicus. Five bucks says the graveyard shift is sacked out.”
Jorge had no idea what bucks were, but it didn’t sound like a bet he was willing to take. He looked at McAlister. “If he’s right, then no one knows we’re here. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“You’re not going to contact anyone?” Vargas asked.
“I’d rather be discreet, at least until we have a better idea of where things stand. Someone may eventually figure out we’re here, but . . .”
“Oh, I’m sure someone
will
figure it out, sooner or later. But until they do . . .” Vargas shrugged. “Yeah, you’d do well to maintain radio silence. With any luck, we’ll be a long way from here before anyone gets around to trying to locate and track us.”
“My thoughts exactly,” McAlister said. While the other men were talking, he had finished entering the coordinates into the nav system. He pressed the key marked EXEC, and luminescent figures appeared on the center screen. “All right now, hold tight . . .”
“Hey!” Vargas snapped. “How about a little warning?”
McAlister grinned, the only sign that he wasn’t ignoring him. Grasping the yoke with his left hand, the pilot gently pushed the throttle bar forward. A hollow thrum from the rear of the spacecraft as its main engine ignited, then Jorge felt himself being pushed back into his seat. Vargas yelped as he grabbed another ceiling rung for support; reaction-control thrusters fired to adjust the shuttle’s trajectory, and an instant later the view through the cockpit windows changed as Earth and the Moon gradually shifted positions.
Their next stop was Earth.
Once the
Mercator
achieved cruise velocity, it would take a little
less than seven hours for the shuttle to reach its destination. McAlister fired the nuclear main engine until the shuttle reached 1-g. This used up most of the shuttle’s fuel, but since he was counting on replenishing the hydrogen tanks from Earth’s atmosphere once they arrived, there was no point in holding anything in reserve beyond what he’d need to make a safe landing. Besides, if someone on the Moon was alerted to the
Mercator
’s presence, the additional speed would make it harder for the shuttle to be located and tracked.
Yet there was no need to worry. While everyone except McAlister and him slept, Jorge had continued to monitor the space communications network, roaming across the different radio bands as he sought to detect any conversations that might indicate that someone had become aware of an unusual event that had occurred at Starbridge Earth. All he had heard, though, was normal comlink chatter, and remarkably little even of that. It was as if traffic between Earth and the Moon had become a fraction of what it had once been. Indeed, he and McAlister spotted only one other craft: a distant, starlike object that went by in the other direction, probably a lunar freighter making a routine outbound flight.
“After the bridge went down, that was pretty much it for the offworld colonies,” Vargas explained. He lounged in his seat in the passenger compartment, his outstretched legs crossed together and floating in the center aisle. Now that the shuttle was no longer accelerating, its interior had returned to free-fall conditions. “It was . . . well, the last straw, I guess you could say. The Western Hemisphere Union had collapsed, the European Alliance was barely holding together, the Pacific Coalition was in ruins, and just about everything else was a mess. Without access to 47 Uma, there was nowhere for refugees to go. It wasn’t long before the lunar and Martian colonies became overcrowded, and after a while the various governments back home got tired of supporting them when they were having so much trouble feeding their own people.”
“So they pulled out and left the colonies to fend for themselves?” Jorge shifted restlessly in his seat. Although he’d taken a break from monitoring the comlink to catch a nap in the passenger compartment, the larger couch wasn’t much more comfortable. “I suppose that makes sense.”
“But Copernicus Centre is still there.” Inez shook her head, not quite understanding what Vargas had said. “So are the Mars colonies . . . or at least that’s what you told us before.”
“Oh, sure, they’re still there. So’s Highgate, for that matter.” Vargas shrugged. “But when the governments pulled out, their own economies collapsed. It wasn’t long before most people there decided that enough was enough.” A grim smile. “Life on Earth might be tough, but at least you didn’t have to pay for the air you breathed or the water you drank . . . and everyone had forgotten how much those had been subsidized by the Earth governments.”
“So the colonies emptied out?” Jorge asked.
“Pretty much, yeah.” Vargas took a sip from the water bulb in his hand. “They’re still self-sufficient, more or less . . . a little more so, now that they don’t have so many of their own mouths to feed . . . but some of the smaller settlements have become ghost towns, and even Highgate only has half the population it once did.” A wry grin. “Another reason why I was able to steal the
Guevara
so easily. Hardly anyone left in the Jupiter colonies, y’know, so no one really gave a damn about a freighter on its way to the junkyard.”
“Hard to believe that people aren’t leaving Earth anymore,” Inez said. “When I was a little girl, I was taught that humankind became a spacefaring race several centuries ago. And most of the Talus races were traveling the galaxy long before that.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Vargas crushed the empty bulb within his fist. “You can thank your dear old dad for this. Once he set himself up as a messiah, he managed to convince a lot of people that they didn’t belong out here.” He absently batted the bulb back and forth between his hands. “That’s how the whole thing got started . . . him preaching about how we all needed to convert to
Sa’Tong
, come home from the Moon and Mars, start raising corn and beans . . .”
“I don’t believe you.” Inez stared at him. “A
chaaz’maha
would never insist that anyone convert to
Sa’Tong
. It’s not a religion, and we don’t have messiahs. And my father wouldn’t . . .”
“Uh-huh, sure.” Vargas regarded her with patronizing contempt. “And when was the last time you talked to your old man?”
“That’s enough.” Jorge said. “Leave her father out of this. Your only job is to help us find him.”
Vargas glared at him, and for a moment Jorge thought the former pilot was going to challenge him. But then Greg moved a little closer; floating in the back of the compartment, the sergeant had been quiet throughout the conversation, but he was clearly prepared to back up the expedition leader. Vargas noticed Dillon hovering nearby; apparently realizing that he was outnumbered, he slowly raised his hands.
“Calm down, Lieutenant.” An easy smile appeared on his face. “Not trying to start anything.” He glanced at Inez. “My apologies. No offense intended.”
Inez didn’t respond, but instead turned back around in her seat. Jorge was about to tell Vargas to keep his opinion to himself when he heard McAlister call down to the flight deck.
“We’re about an hour away from ETA,” McAlister said. “I’ll be commencing braking maneuvers soon. Jorge, I’m going to need you here. The rest of you, stow everything that’s loose.”
“Thanks, Captain. On my way.” One last look at Vargas, then Jorge unbuckled his seat harness and, pushing himself down the center aisle, headed for the cockpit.