A picture! Terrible. Solarizing. Riddled with interference. Pat. Todd sagged with relief, as much as he could in free fall. He hastily read the military confirms with ERS and Navstar. Pat was in CNAU’s Caribbean sector, off the Keys, heading east by southeast, closing fast with Saunderhome. Going to arrest his own mother, as acting officer of Protectors of Earth.
He looked awful. Carissa’s words, “They crucified him,” seemed no exaggeration. Pat Saunder was a man who had been flogged, cut down from a cross, and disemboweled emotionally.
Other screens flashed and flickered. Other defense tactics. Other missiles being triggered to self-destruct. Todd glanced at McKelvey. The techs were holding their breath. Missiles, trying to rip open the station’s guts and kill its people. Strike-center screens jumped. Damage Control was pouring in reports of casualties. McKelvey said, “Hold. Use the fighters. Check for more hostile blips before we launch.” Doubt and consternation on his techs’ faces. But they obeyed.
Another hit. The room tumbled around Todd. Several screens gave way and a bulkhead seeped air. For a few minutes, there was wild confusion. Todd felt his suit ballooning. Puncture! Damage was beside him, scanning, slapping sealant on his shoulder. Somewhere, a tech was screaming in death agony. A call for medics was going out. Todd pulled himself back to the screen with Pat’s face. Incredibly, Pat’s staticky image was still there. “Kid? Mari? My God! Are you there?”
It was Todd’s own heart-stopped plea of moments before, returned to him with frantic love. Mari was there. So was McKelvey. A monitor voice was reciting dispassionately, “Thirty-four dead, ninety-six casualties . . .”
On the blurry image, Pat’s face drained of blood. “Todd, they can’t hit back. Let them hit me, but not Earth. It’s over. No more launches . . .”
Todd broke through. “Jael’s making your will, Pat. She’s not going to let you repair all the damage.”
Technicolor streaks danced across the screen. Chatter. Military talk. The arrest escort. Firing. Dogfight in progress. Pat’s co-pilot was a ghostly face, dimly seen behind Pat, the whites of the man’s eyes showing.
“You noticed, kid? She sabotaged my plane, too. How the hell did . . . she always did pay for the best.” He paused, apparently listening to someone out of frame or to another communication on his intercom. Then the already-erratic picture tore up completely for a moment as a near-miss rocked Pat’s ship. When the image steadied out once more, Pat was smiling, a smile that terrified Todd. Very calmly, sounding amused, Pat said, “The very best. We seem to be carrying the nastiest bomb Galbraith’s war suppliers make. Interesting, huh, kid? And it’s rigged so well we can’t get rid of it, looks like.” Pat’s awful smile widened in grim appreciation of his no-win situation. “My people have managed to disengage the timer. But that’s the best we can do. When they booby-trapped this baby, they made sure I’d never put her down intact. Neat. Mother plans for me to go out in style, with a glorious fireworks display.”
Amid the bloody chaos in Goddard command center, people heard him and stared at the screen in shock. On other screens, the only blips were the surviving Goddard Defense Units. Losses and hits totaled on the registers. No counterlaunch from the habitat yet, but trigger fingers poised over the switches. If McKelvey would just continue to hold his fire . . . ! No more deaths!
And death was very much on Todd’s mind. He tried to wish Pat’s words away. “She can’t . . . !”
“She has. Haven’t you, Mother? Take a look, kid. She wants me out of the setup entirely, so she can rule the roost the way she used to. But it’s not going to work out that way.” Todd sensed the steely resolve behind Pat’s deceptively serene tone and shivered.
The screen, splitting, showing Jael in a frame beside her eldest. Calm. As calm as Pat. She was still sitting at the desk. But outside the window the lovely land- and seascape was shattered by red streaks and explosions. The dogfight, coming home to her. Todd thought of the servants, of the innocent people living on the island. More “regrettable accidents” in Jael’s final grab for power. Jael was going to take them, and Pat, with her. She peered out at Todd, in the space station hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, and at Pat, homing in on her at deadly speed. “I’m sorry about this. You should have done it my way. I do love you. I love you all . . .”
“And if
you
can’t take charge of my child, neither will I, is that it, Mother?” Pat shook his head. “You thought ‘Rissa would be your little toady, safe under your thumb. My baby, too.”
Todd heard the crackle of the energy bolts around them. Each contact with Pat or Jael was delayed by nearly a second. The rule of communications in space. He might as well have been at Saturn’s orbit, listening to this as the alien messenger was.
“ETA three minutes, Mother.” Pat turned, talking to someone in his ship. “I thought so. Can’t eject. Sorry. I guess you’ll ride it in with me. One last ride to earn your pay . . .”
“Patrick,” Jael began.
“Roy’s with Carissa. He’s good with her. He’ll take care of her. He and Todd. He died once for this family; no need for Roy to be hurt again.”
But Roy
would
be hurt. So would they all, helplessly listening.
“I’ve got all the barriers up, Patrick,” Jael said. “You won’t get through.”
“I’m a missile. You made me into one. And our fighters have knocked each other out. I’m all alone now, Mother, and your barrier fire teams are gone. You can’t stop me and I can’t land. So I suppose there’s only one way to finish this off.” He laughed. “Two minutes and closing. How’s that, kid? Just like a vid drama. Or did they ever do that, even on those? I’ve got the ship now. I’ll fly her in, just like we used to. Remember, brat? Are you there, Mari?”
Mariette touched her helmet com, connecting in. “I’m listening. Oh, Pat!”
“Don’t cry. Mother knows best. I can see the island, kids. Shot to hell. It’s not beautiful any more. The bridges are gone. The hurricane walls are broken, Jael. So much for all those fancy deterrents we installed.” The strange smile slid off his handsome face. “My kid’s not going to grow up in a world where Jael Hartman Saunder kills to gain power over the Earth.”
“I’m sorry, Patrick,” Jael said. Dry-eyed. No anger. A bit of regret.
“Fifteen seconds. Once-in-a-lifetime ride, Todd, Mari. Right in over the trees. Take care . . .”
“Patrick . . .” Jael was pursing her lips, chiding him, as she had when he was a boy and had been naughty.
The screen went blank.
They had been dead for several seconds when that happened. Gone. Both of them. And everyone else at Saunderhome. The mansion, the observation tower where Ward and Todd had played with inventions and gazed out at the tropical seas, the white beach where Todd and Dian had made love, the bubble-domed arena where Ward Saunder lived each year, for a while, on the anniversary of his birth—gone before the knowledge of the fact could reach Todd Saunder’s eyes and brain.
Todd knew nothing. He had never been anywhere else. He had always been slumped over a monitor screen in Goddard’s command center, his throat raw from suppressed screaming. He had no tears. He was empty.
After ages, he sensed a heavy, consoling touch on his shoulder. He turned and blinked. McKelvey. Kevin’s gaze was agony. Mari was beside him, holding him, weeping behind her faceplate. “There aren’t any more blips,” Kevin said. “We’ll hold our offensive launches. As long as necessary. We’ll give the new people at Protectors of Earth a chance. Pat deserves that. Pat Saunder paid for it . . . the highest price anyone could ask.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ooooooooo
“RETRO braking, two-second burn.”
Todd gripped the safety hold, riding it out. Delicate adjustments on the ship’s forward course. Good. They couldn’t afford to overrun the vehicle waiting ahead in lunar parking orbit. McKelvey’s pilots handled the big ship well. They were every bit as skilled as Kevin and Mari had bragged they were. Spacers. Pilots who had earned their experience moving craft between Earth, the Moon, Goddard, and mass driver nets. Now they brought the Earth-Goddard Science Council ship into line with a small messenger from beyond the Solar System.
Scientists shifted restlessly in their couches, eager to make contact. They had fought hard for berths on this ship, the first one to touch the alien machine. They had come from Earth and the Moon and the space station, proud of being selected. There were those who hadn’t had to fight, who had received their tickets through unanimous acknowledgment of their achievements, efforts which had made all this possible. Dr. Dian Foix, Chief Tech Beth Isaacs, Tech Anaya, Todd Saunder . . .
Beth was seated to Dian’s left. She was nodding, her eyes aglow. The scars were almost completely gone now, thanks to time and reconstructive surgery. Dian touched her colleague’s hand, then smiled at Todd. “We’re here. We made it.”
He returned the smile, then looked at the ComLink view screen before him. Signals from the vehicle ahead. And signals from Earth, arriving simultaneously, even though the ones from Earth had set forth minute seconds earlier than the alien’s.
Global assembly of Protectors of Earth. The debate still went on, though on a different plane. The paranoia hadn’t completely gone away. It couldn’t, not until they knew a great deal more. A million or more years of evolution built in the fear, the hesitation. Another form of life, from another world. The child, looking across a gulf of space, watching a messenger approach, excited yet apprehensive.
A lot had happened in eight months. More changes, for a planet bewildered by changes. Adjustments, learning, if not full acceptance. And the woman on the podium had helped immeasurably, astonishing those who had thought they knew what she was like. Carissa Duryea Saunder. She didn’t have her late husband’s wonderful voice, but she was beautiful, sweet-faced, an embodiment of a new ideal—she and her tiny son. Roy Paige stood on the podium beside her. He held a wide-eyed infant—Stuart Saunder, who had never seen his father and never would, save via holo-mode. General Ames was there, too. And many new, emergent leaders who had come through the upheaval. Protectors of Earth Chairman Fairchild was watching Carissa, approving. The Third Millennium leader had provided just the calm, confident touch Earth had needed during this crucial transition period. Carissa had come under her wing, taking her own first steps into the public eye, as her baby would soon take his faltering initial strides out into the world, and then into the universe.
“. . . appreciate this honor you’ve given me. I will try to be worthy of the trust. I know Patrick would have thanked you, too. He wanted so to help you and make Earth a better place for us all. In his memory, carrying forward the work he never had a chance to finish, we will become part of a greater community, one that reaches to the farthest stars.”
A lot of humanity didn’t want that yet. Shrank from the concept. But they were following, letting themselves be soothed and persuaded. Trusting, once more. They had lived through the moment when Goddard held them in the palm of its hands, when the tyrants nearly set loose extinction upon the planet and its Moon. Now Carissa Duryea Saunder and the people on the stage promised they would take care of them, heal the lingering wounds, smooth the path to meeting the aliens. Belief, held in Carissa’s husky, trembling, endearing voice. No powerful timbre, no mesmerizing stare. Softer, subtler, Pat’s lovely widow. The newest assembly member of Protectors of Earth. It looked as if her climb to genuine rank and power would be as swift as Patrick’s had been, but with a happier ending.
Todd looked at Dian again, exchanging confidences without a word. Carissa had to win. Jael had called her, and Carissa had called Todd to tip him off. If Jael had triumphed, Canisa knew she would have been safe, anyway. She could have blamed her disloyalty to Jael on hormonal upsets, the stresses of pregnancy. And if Pat had won, she would have tried to protect him. They had both perished, and Carissa had risen from their ashes. Saunder Enterprises had suffered. Stripped of much of its property and wealth, strict new laws set upon the power it could control in the future. The Antarctic Enclave was under new management, among most other divisions which Patrick and Jael Saunder had commanded. Yet Carissa wasn’t a poverty case. The Duryeas were wealthy, too, and she had salvaged a great deal from the wreckage of Pat’s fortune and Jael’s. Stuart Saunder was going to be a very pampered little boy.
And his future was going to be complicated by the vehicle dead ahead.
Maneuvering gently, carefully. Todd and Dian and the others watching on the monitors. For once, even though he wasn’t piloting, Todd had a ringside seat, could watch the fun. Mari and Kevin sitting nearby, equally enthralled at the procedure.
The alien vehicle, hanging in orbit. They had explained to it what they wanted to do. Even this close to Earth, it had thought over the requests for a while and analyzed them. Then . . . yes. It had agreed. They had passed its tests. And it had the technology to set them a humbling array of tests. It had slowed itself precisely, taking up lunar orbit, waiting for them to come to it. An instructor from beyond Pluto.
Immense bay doors opening. Waldos and grapnels extending, touching, guiding the vehicle into the bay with exquisite patience. Nothing must be disturbed or damaged. Man’s servants, inviting the alien machine—the aliens’ servant—into mankind’s parlor. The vehicle wasn’t designed for planetary landing. Another test of the intelligence and technology of whatever species it might contact. That species—in this case,
Homo sapiens
—would have to have the ability to come out into space, at least a short distance, or the vehicle’s gifts would be lost. Entering atmosphere, it would disintegrate. Only in space could its secrets be unlocked.
Todd suited up with the rest, wondering if he looked as shaky and thrilled as some of them did. This was going to happen only once in all the history of mankind. And the potentials!
The locks sighed open and they entered the bay. The suits were a precaution the scientists advised. For now, the vehicle was being kept in a vacuum, all pressure systems designed to prevent contamination. So much to learn, including whether man was compatible with whatever organisms the alien might have brought across space with it from its masters.
Scanners were already running, greedy, capturing the close-up image of the spindly, cylindrical, spider-shaped craft.
So much like some of our own early space explorers,
Todd thought, fascinated.
It might be one more evidence that they’re like us.
“They could be lying to us.” Surprisingly, it was Mari who voiced that suspicion. She had gotten over the worst of her resentment at having Goddard’s explorative thunder stolen by the aliens. But she was wise enough to touch the risks involved in this first contact. “It could tell us whatever its makers wanted it to. The truth, or an illusion to put us off guard.”
“Yes, it could,” Todd agreed. Dian and McKelvey and the scientists were glancing at them, momentarily tearing themselves away from looking at the place where the waldos were gingerly inviting the vehicle to open its inner workings. “We won’t know until we meet them face to face. If they’re still alive.”
Science had attempted to educate humanity, these past months. During the frenzy caused by Earth First’s old campaign, the planetsiders had believed almost without question that the aliens
were
alive, waiting to strike and to enslave or kill everyone on Earth. Now, after months in which to calm down and listen—without the interference of campaign rhetoric—other possibilities were being spelled out to them. There could be another situation, a poignant and disappointing one. Maybe the vehicle was the relic of a vanished species. A lonely little messenger, cruising forever in search of neighbors for its masters who were now dead.
They didn’t know. They wouldn’t know, for months, years, decades.
“Faster-than-light drive?” McKelvey speculated, his eyes bright.
Dian was shaking her head. “I doubt it. A damned good drive, but there’d be no need, not for a robot messenger.”
“If only . . .” Mari’s gloved hand closed into a claw, possessive. The same lust Kevin McKelvey had expressed was in her voice and on her face. Goddard wanted the stars, and it wanted them now, not generations from now.
“We’ll have to wait and see what we find,” Todd said softly. Patience. He had a lot of that now. Once he had wanted things to happen in a hurry, too. Pat’s death and Jael’s seemed to have burned that out of his soul. He felt older, but not weary. Willing to bide his time. It no longer seemed so important that all the discoveries be made during his own life. There would be a future for mankind now. If not Todd Saunder—or Ward Saunder—maybe it would be a Saunder yet unborn who would find out what lay beyond the Sun’s family.
The long view. Ward would have approved. Live and do the best you can. But Ward Saunder had never been greedy. And his surviving son didn’t intend to be, either.
The alien machine. Opening. Communicating. On the close-up monitors Todd saw the microscopic inspection of the vehicle’s com systems and started. Not identical to his own ComLink satellite equipment. Yet he recognized certain shapes and connections, despite the alien alloys and features. For an instant, he thought of holo-modes. The vehicle, capable of . . . what? Creating an illusion to make them think they were seeing these things?
No need, he repeated to himself. Distance was the alien species’ protection. Humanity was an infant. Not yet a threat to them. If humanity grew up, maybe it would never be a threat, to the aliens or to itself, ever again.
One of the screens was continuing the relay from Earth. Carissa’s speech, over. A swelling of applause within Protectors of Earth’s assembly, a storm of approving feedback from the watching audience around the world. Carissa moving to Roy Paige, taking baby Stuart Saunder from him, cradling the infant in her arms, smiling to the world.
Through the pain of memories, Todd smiled back at her image. Dian was moving toward the vehicle, wanting to see it up close. He followed, one among the distinguished scientists, loyal Beth Isaacs, his sister, McKelvey, the techs, and Dian. People who had helped along the way—Fairchild, Ed Lutz, Dr. Tedesco, General Ames, countless others—would read and see what they found here, their minds reaching out into space.
Todd didn’t hurry, didn’t crowd. He had sponsored the search. His team had found it. He could wait. He stood back, gazing at the vehicle that had come across time and space an unknown distance to say hello to mankind.
Time and space, and Earth. The answers weren’t going to be simple. They rarely were. But mankind would get them. And someday, Todd Saunder was going to shake hands with a living being from another species, as well as observe the unlocking of that species’ robot messenger. Smiling, the smile becoming an optimistic grin, he teetered on his boots, leaning forward, as the
real
communication process finally began.