Icehenge (6 page)

“They've gotten through those before,” I said, worrying about Mars.

“That doesn't mean much. They never had a population of six billion before. Even the trouble on Mars may be enough to push them over the brink! It's a very delicate, artificial ecology, Emma. Much like this little starship of ours. And if it falls apart, then the chance to go to the stars is gone for a long time. Maybe forever. So we're doing it ourselves, right here and now.”

“You have a vision—”

“Not just me!”

“I meant all of you.”

“Ah. Sorry. English should make that distinction.”

“Does Russian?”

“Not really.” We laughed.

The force of his ideas had impelled Davydov around the farm, and velcro
rips
had accompanied his words as he walked between the rows of vegetables. When he finished, I watched his dark face through the distorting glass of a spare algae bottle—his ice-blue eyes were the size of eggs, staring at me intently. I thought, He wants to convince me of these things. It matters to him what I think. This idea made me flush with pleasure, and it occurred to me that this was how he had become the leader of this visionary group. Not by any choice of the Mars Development Committee, looking for a scapegoat. He was the leader because he could make people feel this way.

The intercom system crackled. “Oleg?” It was John Dancer's voice, sounding scared. “Oleg, are you hearing me? Respond quickly please.”

Davydov hurried to the wall with the intercom and flicked it on. “What is it, John?”

“Oleg! We need you on the bridge quick. Emergency.”

“What is it?”

“We've spotted three ships approaching through two-belt central. Looks like police craft.”

Davydov looked across at me. “I'll be there right away,” he said. He ran between the vegetables to my side. “Looks like that trouble on Mars isn't occupying all of them.” His voice was still light and joking, but his eyes were grim. “Come along.”

*   *   *

So I went with him, across to the bridge of
Rust Eagle.
There were about a dozen people there, a few attending to the
Eagle,
the rest to Davydov and Ilene Breton.

“They're coming in an equilateral triangle pattern,” Ilene said. “Simon spotted them by visual check—after he had seen the one, he ran through the police patterns and found the other two. If they don't make any adjustments, they'll come by with one on each side of us and one below.”

“How long do we have?” Davydov asked.

“They're decelerating now. They'll pass this sub-group in about three hours.”

I have never seen such a grim collection of people in my life. Only the clicks and breath of the ship's functions broke the silence that followed this announcement. I thought of it. Everything I had just seen, and the forty years of dangerous work it had taken to get it here, were now the prey of a diligent hunter. It could all end in four hours, in capture and imprisonment, return to Mars under guard, in the “starship.” Or it could end in sudden death. Those Committee ships carry quite the arsenals.

“How fast are they moving?” Davydov asked.

Ilene said, “Two or three k's per second.”

“They've got a lot of space to search,” Swann said hopefully.

“They're bracketing us!” Ilene said. “They'll see us. By radar, heat scan, metal scan, visual, radio pick-up—somehow they'll see us.”

“No more radio transmissions,” Davydov said.

“We've already shut down,” Ilene replied. Her white, pinched face looked impatient—she was waiting for everyone to catch up with her, and help.

They looked at each other.

“We could line up all of our lasers,” said Olga Borg, captain of
Lermontov.
“Fire them up their exhaust vents”—she realized that would have no effect on the shields—“or hit them in the bridges, or the reactor shield generators.”

“Those shields are too well protected,” Swann said. But several others were nodding, their mouths pressed tight. They couldn't run—their backs were to the wall. They would fight and die. And, I thought, I would die too.

Ilene said, “If we give them any time they'll have a message off, and our position will be revealed. Other police ships would be here in a week.”

“More than that—”

“Why don't you just hide?” I interjected.

They all stared at me. It reminded me of Nadezhda and Marie-Anne.

“We're being bracketed,” Swann explained.

“I know that. But you aren't at the exact center of the triangle, are you? So if you were to bring these ships right onto the surface of Hilda, or near it, and moved around the top as the bottom ship moved under you, if you see what I mean, then you might stay out of sight the entire time.”

“One of the side ships would see us,” Ilene said.

“Maybe,” I began, but Davydov interrupted: “We could shade to one side of Hilda, and keep Hilda itself between us and one side ship—then maneuver to keep one of the adjacent rocks between us and the other side ship. So Hilda would protect us from two of them, and one of her daughters from the third!”

“If that's possible,” Ilene said.

“It won't work,” Olga Borg declared.

“You tell me how they will detect you through an asteroid,” I said.

Swann was smiling, crookedly. “We can hide, but we can't run.”

“We can't use rockets to move around Hilda,” Ilene said practically. “They'd see the exhaust.”

It was like the games of hide-and-seek I had played as a child, on the broad boulder plains of Syrtis Major.

“You could pull the ships around with lines,” I said. “Anchor winches here and there on the surface, and haul us around the rock as the ships go by. That'd give you better control anyway.”

They liked that one. “But how will we see them?” Ilene asked. “What if they change directions while we're behind Hilda?”

“We'll put observers on the surface,” Davydov said. “They can report with hand signals. Relay teams of observers.” He thought about it. “Right. Let's go with that.” He started pacing around the room,
rip rip rip.
“Let's go, we don't have much time! Ilene, get two boats onto the surface of Hilda. Make sure they take everything they'll need, because they won't be able to come back till it's over. Have them place a couple of deadmen as deep as they can in fifteen minutes.”

The nice thing about the plan was that most of it was standard mining procedure: closing on a rock, preparing for drilling.… “Have John and the other mining people work out the lines. Oh—tell the boats to use their thrusters only in the boat bays and on the back side of Hilda.” A thought struck Davydov, and he started to look in my direction. Thought better of it. “All of the non-MSA people are to be paired with their roommates, where possible, or with someone else if the roommates are busy. I want Duggins, Nordhoff, and Valenski under close surveillance. Keep them in the living quarters and don't tell them what's going on. Emma, you stay here.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “I'll miss my nap.”

With a nervous pattering of laughter the group scattered to their various tasks.

Davydov walked over to me. “Thank you, Emma. It's a good plan.”

I waved a hand, wondering what I had done—or rather, why I had done it. “The only plan, I think.”

“Maybe. But still, it saved us time.” His smile and his eyes were bright in his dark face, but he wasn't really thinking about me anymore. His jaw bunched with tension. Ilene called him and he turned and walked over to her.

I sat and waited.

When the lines had been set—it took nearly an hour—I went with Davydov and Olga to the little window room opposite the bridge, which gave a view from the other side of the ship. The lines stretching from us to Hilda (the asteroid was about seven kilometers long, I judged, not an over-large object to hide three ships behind) were like silver thread, only visible by a sort of act of the imagination. The pulling began and the lines came straight. Off to one side the lines leading to the starship could just be seen. Davydov left to return to the bridge. A long time passed; Hilda came closer. At last the bare, rough blue-gray rock of the asteroid was no more than a hundred meters away. Now the
Eagle
's center rocket was expelling tiny puffs to keep the two objects from coming together—to keep us from falling (drifting, actually) onto the surface. I imagined I could feel the mysterious tug of gravity.

Swann came by and asked me to return to the bridge. As I walked up the tube (and now there was an up), I noticed an unusual silence. A lot of systems had been shut down. The three ships had become, to the outer world, inert objects.

Ilene had set up a computer display on the big viewscreen, which indicated our two ships, the outline of the asteroid as seen from our original location, and the three police ships. These were out of our radar view, and were being located by observers out on the asteroid's surface—people crawling around in EVA suits, hiding behind rocks like the scouts of old Earth. The bridge was crowded again.

We waited, watching the green screen with its shifting purple lines and points. The computer people and John Dancer were still programming our maneuvers. The rest of us sat and watched.

“I've got them on visual,” came the report from one of the surface observers. “About ten degrees above my horizon, vertical ninety-five or a hundred.”

“Tell him to point his suit exhaust at the ground,” Davydov said into the mike.

The lines started to pull us around the asteroid, moving at a pretty snappy pace. On the green display screen we stayed near the center, two purple squares; the asteroid's outline shifted down, and the tiny red circles of the police ships rose slowly toward the edge of the outline. If they broached it, they would be in our sky. One of them certainly would. Ilene introduced the small shape of one of the rocks following Hilda onto the screen, the daughter rock that would be between us and that cruiser, for a while at least.

Looking out the bridge's wide plasteel window we could see Hilda curving away from us, the underside of the starship just above us, and behind it the vacuum sky, star-studded. The events on the computer screen could have been a movie, a war game, abstract art—for we could no more see the police than they could see us. Abstract art—and the esthetic was to keep all the dots within the irregular circle.…

The quiet voices kept reporting in for the observers, giving us positions, and Ilene tapped them out accordingly. The little red dots skipped up the screen.

With the police ship below us, it was simple. It would fly by, and we would move up and around the asteroid, keeping it between us and them, and it would never see us. With the ship on our right it was the same, only there wasn't such a big margin. We would remain just under the horizon to that one. This would put us just above the horizon for the third ship, for a few minutes. That was the bad part—but during that time a daughter rock, no more than two kilometers across, would be floating between us and the third ship. By the time this ship flew out from behind the daughter rock, we hoped to be over the horizon of Hilda again, and out of sight of all three of them.

We watched the screen. I looked over at Davydov. He stared impassively at the display, a quizzical, resigned look on his face.

The third ship came over Hilda's horizon, behind the daughter rock. Davydov leaned forward. “Station Three, draw us toward you,” he said into the mike, overriding the program. He waved aside Ilene's protest. “We've got some room to spare on that side,” he said. He concentrated on the screen. “Simon, tell us when you see them,” he said into the mike. I thought of Simon, prone on the surface—

“He says he sees them,” came his observer's voice.

“Pull to Station One, as fast as you can,” Davydov said.

The little blip of the third ship crawled to the line demarcating the daughter rock, and there it sat, on the line—on our horizon, its detecting instruments just above or below it, who could say? “Pull,” Davydov whispered to himself,
“pull.”
I thought, alarm bells could be going off.…

After no more than two minutes, the dot marking the third ship slipped back down under the rock's horizon, and then behind Hilda again. Now Hilda protected us from all three of them.

But we might have been visible, there, for those two minutes.

Simon kept sending us positions, and everyone on the bridge listened with consuming interest.

“They're not slowing,” Swann ventured.

… And so they bombed on by, three police ships of my lawful government. I felt as happy as the others acted, and proud of myself. Although, really, they could have caught us in that minute on the horizon. So it hadn't been that great a plan. But it had worked.

It had been five hours since the first sighting of them—five very long hours, during which I had had little to do but contemplate my life and its potential ending … the kind of dense thinking that is shorthanded by, “my whole life passed before my eyes.” A tornado of the mind. I was tired.

“We'll stay behind Hilda for a day or so,” Davydov said. “Then back to work.” He heaved out a breath, grinned at us. “Time to get out of here.”

*   *   *

When the relieved celebration was over, and I had calmed down, I went into my room and fell into a deep sleep. Just before I woke up, I had a vivid dream:

I was a child, on Mars, and we were playing hide-and-seek, as we often did. We were at the station on Syrtis Major, on one of those broad desert plains that are strewn with boulders—boulders from the size of basketballs up to the size of a small room, all scattered across the plain in a regular pattern that used to baffle our elders. “There's no way such even distribution could be natural,” my father would say, sitting on one of the rocks and staring out at the nearby horizon. “It looks like a stage set.”