The next day, the global datanet interrupted the daily war news with the announcement that Varien hle'Morna, fabulously wealthy manufacturer of spacecraft and related technologies, holder of numerous scientific honors, discoverer of the displacement points that had given humankind the stars (and the Korvaasha, some muttered, though all admitted that the aliens' inexorable expansion would eventually have carried them to the Tareil system anyway) had died in a freak aircar accident. The body fragments found in the wreck made the identification certain—as they should have done, having been cloned and force-grown expressly for the purpose.
Raehan's great loss was duly remarked upon, suitable obsequies were uttered . . . and the world went back to awaiting its end.
In the outer reaches of the system, beyond the orbit of the outermost gas giant, where Tareil itself was little more than a yellow zero-magnitude star, a heavily stealthed ship rendezvoused with a small fleet of like vessels. In a little while, the ships began accelerating still further outward. Each of them, upon reaching a certain location in the void, suddenly surrounded itself with a momentary, space-distorting pulse of artificial gravitation . . . and vanished.
Presently, only two ships were left. They remained, with only the occasional absentminded flare of thrust needed to keep them on station near the region of nothingness that had swallowed their fellows, and monitored the reports of the robotic proxies that kept watch on the distant inner system of Tareil.
Again it was night.
And I had so looked forward to seeing once again a living world's daylight
, Varien thought, pulling his cloak tightly around his old body against the chill. But this was the night of a different world. And it was a different sort of night, here on the third planet of Lirauva's primary stellar component. The planet's sun—a yellow-white star somewhat more massive and luminous than Tareil—had set, but the secondary star of this binary system was in the sky, currently almost halfway out on its long elliptical orbit but still a bright orange flare that illuminated the coastal plain below the bluffs on which this base was built and dimmed all but the brightest stars in the sky—such as Landaen, at which he now gazed.
Not really a very luminous star, he knew—slightly less so than this planet's primary, in fact. But it was so close that light could travel the distance in just under six of Raehan's years. And it was the goal that had brought him here tonight, and that previously had lent urgency to his quest for a means of outpacing light where no displacement points existed. For his earliest outpost here at Lirauva, scanning the nearby stars, had detected the extravagant outpouring of patterned radio waves that could only represent the signature of a fairly advanced civilization, so tantalizingly just beyond this final terminus of the Lirauva Chain.
A patch of blackness flanked by running lights suddenly occluded a few stars, growing rapidly as Aelanni's drop shuttle fell groundward until it reached a sufficiently low altitude for its atmospheric drive to take hold. It then swooped around in a landing pattern that avoided areas of the base where electronic equipment might have been disrupted by the annoying side effects of grav repulsion.
Must do something about that
, Varien entered in his mental filing system as the shuttle settled onto the landing platform, its hatch wheezed open, and, for the first time in over two years, he saw his daughter.
Varien, and Varien alone, had never really seen her beauty. Features that were merely sharp in himself and Tarlann were, in Aelanni, chiseled by a sculptor of genius. Such a sculptor would have been inspired by the body her form-fitting light duty vac suit revealed, moving with unself-conscious grace as she descended the shuttle's ramp in a gravity eight percent less than Raehan's. Her long, thick dark hair held a fascinating reddish glint now brought out by Lirauva's secondary sun; it harmonized with reddish-brown skin, made even more coppery by long exposure to this planet's wind and sun. Her great deep-brown eyes also had a faintly reddish, almost mahogany tone . . . and Varien did, at times, see those eyes, for they were the eyes of his long-dead wife. But mostly he saw a mind as whetted as his son's, and an adventurousness that Tarlann would never possess.
They embraced with the restraint enjoined by their culture, which taught that to display personal passion was to crack open, ever so slightly, a door behind which roared the flames of total war. Still, it was more than the small, formal bows Varien's parents would have exchanged.
"Sorry I was at the orbital station when you arrived," she greeted him. "Miralann is sure he's onto a fundamental breakthrough in . . . well that doesn't matter now, does it?" She withdrew a step and looked him over. He had aged. "How bad is it?"
"Worse than you think . . . however bad that may be. When the last courier was sent here, we thought Raehan couldn't hold. Now we're certain of it."
"So." She gazed somberly around her at the base, and the world, that had been her home for two years. For a moment, it was so quiet that the faint, hissing roar of the distant surf was audible. She then looked upward at the tiny point of yellow-white light. "Then we must all go to Landaen?"
"Oh, not everyone. This base can remain in operation with a skeleton staff—I'll leave the choice of who remains up to you. But if our observers at Tareil ever come here with the news that the Korvaasha have discovered Tareil's fourth displacement point and the Lirauva Chain, it will be necessary to
immediately
obliterate every indication that we ever knew of it. We destroyed all the robot stations in the intervening systems on our way here." (
So much still to learn in those systems!
Aelanni looked as sad as Varien felt.) "And we've brought a fusion device which can be triggered with a minimum of fuss, and is powerful enough to wipe out every trace of this base.
"But," he continued more cheerfully, "for now we'll keep the base operating. I'll need you at Landaen, of course, and certain others . . . notably Miralann."
Aelanni smiled impishly. "For his professional expertise, Father? Or could it be that you also expect his hobby to be useful?" Varien smiled back. The brilliant linguist had made the initial breakthrough that had enabled them to crack the primary Landaeniv language sooner than anyone had expected. But they both knew that Miralann's hobby was the truly eccentric one of military history.
"Well, possibly," Varien allowed. "But I can certainly appreciate his professional achievement. Throughout the voyage here, I've been force-feeding myself that awful language. Of course, sleep-teaching devices are no substitute for actual practice . . . ."
And, Aelanni knew, they exacted a price. She looked again at Varien's haggard face. "Father! At your age . . . !"
"There's no alternative," Varien said harshly. "I must be able to communicate with them. So must we all . . . although the rest of you can take it at a saner pace. And there is no time to be lost. As soon as your ships can be ready, we must depart for Landaen."
Aelanni's gaze drifted upward to the bright yellow-white star again. She had been there, almost a year before. "Yes, Landaen," she said somberly. "It's seemed to dominate our destinies, hasn't it? I remember when you were almost ready to make it, and the entire Lirauva Chain, public knowledge. But then we found out about the Landeniv, and we all agreed that the secret would have to be kept a little longer. There was no predicting how people would react to the news that we had discovered the one, single thing that we had
known
we would
never
discover: another race of
humans
!"
Silence descended again. Trust Aelanni to say it openly and unflinchingly, Varien thought. She was right, of course. The social consequences of blurting out upon the datanets the great contradiction their earliest probing of Landaen had revealed—the starkly impossible which was also starkly factual—were unpredictable. Varien and the group of brilliant people he had gathered around him might think of themselves as fearless iconoclasts; but they were, inescapably, Raehaniv. Uncontrollable, unmanageable change was, simply, bad. So it had been for centuries.
Varien also looked up at the yellow-white star, and the skin at the nape of his neck prickled.
"Well." He spoke a little more loudly than necessary, straightening his cloak. "Whatever my reasons—and I seem to recall hearing the term 'childish secretiveness' from you at the beginning—it is fortunate that I kept the knowledge to myself. For it is now the one advantage we have over the Korvaasha. We must make what use of it we can—for we, here, are now acting for our entire race. As quickly as possible, we must depart Lirauva . . . but no." He smiled, seeking to lighten the mood. "I must practice my Landaeniv, and broaden my vocabulary. What do the Landaeniv call Lirauva? They must have a name for this system—it's one of the brighter stars in their night skies."
"Oh, yes. Let's see . . ." She frowned as she struggled with the impossibly strange syllables. "
Alpha Centauri
, I believe they call it."
Varien nodded, and practiced the words as the two of them walked toward the waiting ground car.
"Colonel, we've got something very odd on the scope."
Lieutenant Colonel Eric DiFalco, United States Space Force, hesitated a moment—Lieutenant Farrell, the duty officer, could be overconscientious at best and excitable at worst—then sighed and thumbed the intercom switch.
"I'm listening, Lieutenant." He wasn't sure he had gotten just the right warning note into his voice. The news from home wasn't exactly something he resented being torn away from. Even Farrell's latest attack of the jitters would be a welcome relief from a detailed analysis of just how the lunatics were going about taking over the asylum.
"Well, sir, it appears to be a spacecraft of unknown origin. Its performance parameters don't check with anything we know about. And . . . it's on a course that should intersect ours in . . ."
DiFalco came out of shock.
Please, God, don't let Farrell be seeing a UFO! And don't let him have already logged it!
He concentrated on making his voice soothing.
"All right, Terry. You were correct to report this. I'll be right up. Keep tracking it." He turned off his digital reader—plenty of time later for a masochistic reading of the Social Justice party's latest gains in the off-year elections—and stood up. It took only two long-legged strides to exit his tiny cabin and step out into the passageway that ran around the outer circumference of USSFS
Andrew Jackson
's spin habitat. People stood aside for him—about as far as military punctilio was carried in a spacecraft under way—as he proceeded to the hatch. He reached up, grabbed the rail, and pulled himself up and over into the weightless central access shaft, compensating with practiced ease for the Coriolis force. With an occasional assist from the railings, he shot forward past the shuttle docks to the control room.
The contrast between the dim chamber with its glowing instrument panels and the starry firmament beyond the wide-curving viewport seldom failed to affect him. But now he made a preoccupied beeline for the command acceleration couch. Motioning to Farrell to remain seated, he settled to the deck, magnetized soles clamping gently to its surface.
"All right, Terry. What's the status?"
"Unchanged, sir. It's on a ballistic course—a very flat hyperbola, almost a straight line. The computer has projected it backwards, and it seems to have come from a region of the asteroids where we've never had anything." He gestured at a screen showing the simulation of the unknown's orbit, and DiFalco sucked in his breath. That ship had come a long way . . . but then he glanced at its velocity figures, and realized that it could have covered the distance in a reasonable length of time after all. "And as for where they're going . . . well, Colonel, the only explanation that makes sense is that they want to intercept us." Farrell's voice was steady.
At least he has the balls to lay his opinion on the line
, DiFalco admitted to himself.
"No possibility that it's Chinese, I suppose," he asked. It wasn't much of a hope, anyway; they had no reason to be in this particular segment of space outside the orbit of Mars.
"Negative, sir. That was the first thing we checked. Nothing of theirs has been in a position to have gotten into that orbit, even if they had anything that could manage that many sustained gees." He glanced at the time. "By the way, Colonel, enough time has elapsed from our initial hail for us to have received a reply from that ship, if they'd sent one."
DiFalco glared at the offending blip. A UFO. Just fucking beautiful.
The term had originated in the second half of the twentieth century, when many people had looked skyward in search of a substitute for religion and persuaded themselves that they had seen alien spacecraft performing impossible feats in pursuit of no intelligible objective. It had died out in the early decades of the present century, as space flight had settled into routine and the we-are-alone arguments of Tipler and others had fossilized into dogma—the scientific establishment had come to reject the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence with such unanimity that the concept hardly even appeared in science fiction any more.
But over the last few years, curious reports had begun to appear. They never seemed to have any unambiguous instrument corroboration, and DiFalco had always been inclined to write them off as a product of the general lunacy of the times. (The California school system had recently required that astronomy texts give equal space and respect to the flat-Earth theory, for to do otherwise would be "elitist"; the Social Justice party was expected to write a similar requirement into its national platform.) Only . . .
these
reports had come, not from the Great American Majority of functionally illiterate drones, but from space crews, all of whom were very competent people—the only kind that anyone could afford to send into space, which was why the new civilization growing up outside Earth's atmosphere had less and less in common with the collapsing society at the bottom of the gravity well. And
these
UFOs, although decidedly high-performance, hadn't reversed direction without loss of velocity or otherwise violated physical laws.