Levinson gave DiFalco a smile that spoke volumes, and flicked his card into the chute.
Sergeant Thompson stepped slowly forward, looked DiFalco in the eye, and said, "Now people will know for
sure
how good I am!" His ebon card followed Levinson's white one into the chute.
One by one, everyone in the control room followed suit. Loreann looked away . . . this was not her rite. When it was over, they all looked at each other with a self-consciousness that might have seemed strange, given that they had all committed, or been accessories to, offenses under American law that were far worse than the minor felony of destroying an Ethnic Entitlements Card. But this act was a symbolic one; it was their final rejection of what America had become and, by the same token, their reaffirmation of what it had once been. Everyone was silent for a moment, and then looked to the view-aft screen.
Sol had dwindled to a mere star, lost among the star-fields. They could no longer find it.
Snow had fallen for two days, and tonight it blanketed Smolenskaya Street. Sergei Kurganov, looking skyward from the window of his third-storey apartment, could see that the clouds were finally breaking up. It must, he reflected, be a relief to the guards out there keeping watch on this window.
Like everyone else connected with the Project, he had been placed under house arrest by a government which was feeling the primordial tingle of fear in the face of unfathomable mystery. He couldn't deny that he had been treated well, under the circumstances. But now superstitious terror was beginning to shade over into vindictiveness. Some, he knew, had been tortured. He was too high-ranking for that. But soon would come the drugs from which truth could not be withheld.
How sad, that courage, loyalty and friendship count for nothing in the face of mere chemistry!
Yes . . . I have waited too long.
He turned and took a quick look around the apartment, eyes lingering on the photo of Irina as she had been, a decade and a half ago, before she had died with the child she was carrying. He squared his shoulders, strode to the display case, and took out the Nagant Model 1895G officer's revolver that his great-grandfather had carried in the Great Patriotic War.
All the arrestees had, naturally, been denied weapons. But this wasn't a weapon. Of course not. It was an antique. He took out the brass cartridges which had also seemed self-evident antiques to men who were searching for caseless ammunition cassettes, and loaded the pistol. It was good to know that some things were forever unchanging . . . like the stupidity of
chekists
, or whatever they were currently calling themselves.
He next took out the equally-antique silencer. As a rule—and contrary to the belief of twentieth-century television producers—revolvers could not be effectively silenced. The gas-sealing Nagant was the exception. And the guards in the corridor need not be alerted any sooner than necessary. With any luck they wouldn't know until breakfast was delivered.
Preparations completed, he returned to the window. Yes . . . rifts were appearing in the clouds.
I shouldn't have waited so long,
he thought again.
It was an unwarranted risk to take. But I had to wait until the snowstorm ended and I could see the stars.
He gazed at the twinkling, ice-rimmed lights between the clouds. Altair wasn't visible, of course. That would have been too much to hope for. These paltry few stars would have to do.
For what Varien insisted were perfectly logical reasons, displacement points occurred at great distances from giant stars. So the blue-hot inferno of Altair appeared small in viewports that were polarized to shield human eyes from a light at which they had never been meant to gaze. And the fleet had been able to approach reasonably close on continuous-displacement drive before commencing the maneuvers that would bring the ships into correct alignment for transition.
Now DiFalco stood in
Andy J.
's control room and reflected that the universe needed a good special-effects man. Nothing showed ahead but stars, with Altair flaming off to the side. The displacement point itself was perceptible only to Raehaniv instrumentation—and even for that instrumentation it was more a matter of inference than of detection.
Aelanni, and
Pathfinder
, had led the way, vanishing eerily. Others had followed, and now it was
Andy J.
's turn. DiFalco had done his part, directing the ship into the volume of space that defined the displacement point. Now he could only turn to Loreann and give the command: "Execute!"
The stars wavered in the viewport as the space-distorting gravitic pulse built up. Then, too quickly to fully register on human optic nerves, they seemed to crowd together and then explode outward before settling into a serene new pattern. Simultaneously, every human felt a sensation, over almost too quickly to be felt, that something had
happened
—something outside the ordinary range of human experience in that homely subset of reality described by Newton.
DiFalco and Levinson looked at each other, shaken. "Did you feel that, XO?"
Levinson nodded. "Yeah. It wasn't painful. It was just . . .
wrong
."
"One grows used to it," Loreann put in. "We haven't been able to account for it; the displacement has absolutely no detectable physiological effect. But everyone feels it. Evidently the ongoing small transpositions of the continuous-displacement drive are individually too slight to trigger it. And we have learned that the Korvaasha do not experience it. Varien has speculated that it may operate on the same level as psionic phenomena, a subject which is still as much an uncharted swamp to us as it is to you."
"In short, he doesn't know squat about it," DiFalco grunted, obscurely pleased. He gazed out the viewport, studying the sky.
Constellations are invented by people who live at the bottom of a dense atmosphere that filters out all but the brighter stars; in deep space, they are lost among the unwinking stellar multitude in which only trained eyes can discern patterns.
DiFalco had such eyes, and even without the white sun that shone off the port bow it would have been clear to him that
Andy J.
lay in a new sky, rendered unrecognizeable by a transposition of three hundred light-years. Not only Sol but even Altair was invisible. And, all at once, he knew what he had only thought he had known four months earlier, when they had departed Sol: absolute severance from his home and the home of all his ancestors, the setting of all his memories.
So be it.
"X.O.," he said in a voice of iron, "wipe the data on that displacement point from the computer. Mr. Farrell," he continued, turning to the helm, "proceed in formation with
Pathfinder
, to this star's other displacement point."
They drove on into the void.
One by one, the ships flickered into existence in yet another new sky. After the last one, with its mismatched stellar pair (an intense little white dwarf whipping in a high-velocity orbit around a bloated red giant that somehow seemed bored with its antics), this one made them homesick. The distant G0v sun was very nearly the yellow-white of Sol—a half-shade whiter, just as it was fractionally hotter, more massive, and therefore more luminous.
And, DiFalco reflected, there was an even better reason why this system should seem like home. It
was
home now, at least for the immediate future, and they might as well get used to it.
Not only the sun but also its family of planets had a homelike aspect. He had studied the data from Aelanni's initial survey; the planetary orbits more or less conformed to the old Titius-Bode Relation (as did those of almost all the systems on which the Raehaniv had data, which had given the Terran astrophysicists furiously to think) but were slightly more closely spaced than those of the Solar System. The fourth planet, their destination, was only 1.28 astronomical unit from its sun, putting it just beyond the outer edge of what would once have been thought to be the liquid-water zone, before the discovery of what had once been river beds on Mars had caused a rethinking of such things.
One difference was the lack of a well-defined asteroidal belt. Here, no Jupiter-sized bully of a gas giant had precluded a planet's coalescence by its brutally disruptive gravity. The largest gas giant was little more massive than Saturn. It was for this planet—the seventh outward from the sun—that their course was now set.
Using a giant planet's gravity well as an interplanetary "slingshot" was not a new concept; Terrans had used it to speed their earliest unmanned probes into the outer Solar System. Computer projections of the relative positions of this system's planets at the time of their emergence fron the one local displacement point had suggested the possibility of using the technique to shorten their travel time to the fourth planet. That this system was being so obliging to its new residents seemed to DiFalco an excellent omen.
Of course, he had never heard of doing it with a fleet before. Varien and Aelanni had assured him, via communicator, that there was no theoretical difficulty involved . . . but, to be on the cautious side, the ships would proceed one by one rather than attempting the manuever simultaneously, in formation.
The gas giant grew rapidly until it seemed to fill the universe, banded in shades of orange and yellow, with swirling storms that could have sucked all Earth down into the deep hydrogen atmosphere under those methane/ammonia clouds. It lacked the ring system that graced many such planets, but it possessed the usual extensive family of satellites.
With its occasional, unpredicatble course corrections, this would have been a rough ride indeed without artificial gravity. As it was,
Andy J.
's control room crew kept to their acceleration couches as the ship began to swing around the "rim" of the gravity well, down which it otherwise would have fallen without hope of escape. That awesome pull would now be used, in a kind of cosmic judo, to fling them onward . . . as it had already flung
Pathfinder
and
Liberator
.
DiFalco was thinking about the first of those ships, and its captain, when Aelanni's voice come over the communicator, taut with more strain than could be accounted for by the bumpiness of the ride.
"Urgent," she snapped. "All ships in position to do so should train every available sensor on the third satellite!"
He looked at the situation board. Yes, that satellite was in view, just "above" the limb of the planet. No one had thought of looking at it before; it was so ordinary, doubtless an asteroid captured from this system's relatively sparse supply of such bodies.
"Why?" he asked.
"Just do it!" Her voice was even harsher. "There's no time to explain. But I think you'll understand if you look at a blowup of the imagery you're getting."
He gave the necessary orders, and Levinson entered the commands to
Andy J.
's computer. The ship's main telescope was now slaved to the little satellite, and its image appeared, after a moment of wavering snow, on DiFalco's command screen. He gazed at it critically—a very typical specimen of such bodies, irregular in shape (unlike the larger moons, which were massive enough to have been rounded into spherical form by their own gravity), a mere flying mountain. What had gotten Aelanni so upset?
"Anything unusual about that rock, X.O. ?"
"Not really," Levinson replied. "Pretty low density. And maybe its albedo is a little higher than predicted—and getting more so as our relative motion takes us into view of its other side. Maybe something odd about its composition . . . we'll have to wait a while for the spectroscopic readings. But otherwise . . . Hey!" He sat bolt upright in his acceleration couch. "The albedo
can't
be that much higher on this side! I mean, this is almost what you'd expect for worked metal . . . ." His voice trailed a halt. DiFalco knew why; he had also seen that which stood revealed as the satellite rotated relative to
Andy J.
Worked metal indeed . . . and patterns that incorporated straight lines. Expanses of artificiality amid the rough surface, like the visible surface components of an installation that must occupy much of the interior.
What was that again about low density, Jeff?
No lights, though. No activity. Just an impression, as overwhelming as it was without logical foundation, of deadness.
He finally opened his mouth to say something . . . and the maneuver was completed.
Andy J.
sped on toward the fourth planet, leaving enigma behind.
"No." Aelanni shook her darkly burnished head. "There was absolutely no indication of life on—or
in
—that moon. Of course we tried to communicate, but all we got was silence. And we had our full battery of sensors trained on it for as long as we were within range. If there's any power supply there, for life support or anything else, it doesn't involve fusion reactors or anything else that produces neutrinos. And passive IR confirms the impression that we all had: the entire satellite is uniformly cold. No," she repeated, "that base, or whatever, is dead."
She was addressing a hastily convened meeting in
Liberator
's lounge. It had been their first order of business after taking up orbit around Planet Four. But, by common consent, they had met not in the usual briefing room but somewhere with a viewport. DiFalco's wasn't the only gaze that kept straying to the planet which curved so majestically and invitingly below.
Mass 1.57 times Earth's. Surface gravity 1.18 G. Axial inclination 37.21 degrees, augering a lively climate. And so on . . . none of which seemed to relate in any way to the heart-stopping blue loveliness, swirling with clouds and crowned with blindingly-white polar caps, beyond the viewport. Not exactly the same blue as Earth, of course—this planet had a somewhat denser atmosphere, and its oceans covered nearly nine tenths of its surface. But still . . .
I last saw such a sight from Earth orbit, about to depart for Mars and then the asteroids . . . how long ago? Not even my final memory from Earth—Erica crying that she didn't want me to leave, and Nicole's glare of cold resentment while pulling her away—could spoil that sight! I thought surely I'd see Earth, and Erica, again. Eventually, as the letters got fewer and more dutiful, I gave up on the second. But never the first.