Eventually, she began to go out again. Nothing serious. Dinner and a show. Occasionally she’d take one of her companions into her bed. But it was all more or less academic. She went through a period in which she was actively looking for another Tor, but finally concluded it wasn’t going to happen. Dinner and a show. And maybe a night over. That was what her life had become.
As they moved into the final two weeks before departure, there were three guys more or less in her life. David, Dave, and Harry. She amused herself thinking how she might have encouraged the advances of Dave Calistrano, an executive of some sort at the Smithsonian. That would have given her three guys named Dave. It would have summed up nicely her current status.
She called each and explained she would be gone a long time. (Odd how she described the length of the mission, which would extend into the summer, as short to Maureen and Charlie. Back before you know it. But long, my God, we’ll be out there forever, to Harry and the two Daves.)
They took it well. All three said they’d known it was coming, and they’d be here when she got back.
God, she missed Tor.
In early November, she recruited a specialist and visited Union to inspect the work that was being done on the shielding. You wouldn’t have been able to recognize the Preston. Save for the exhaust tubes, the ship was effectively inside a rectangular container. Sensors, scopes, and navigation lights had all been transferred from the hull to the shielding. Someone had even taken time to imprint the port side with PROMETHEUS FOUNDATION. Rudy would be proud to see that.
The specialist, whose name was Lou, looked at the paperwork, examined the ships, and pronounced everything acceptable. He was a tall, thin, reedy individual with a remarkably high voice. Difficult to listen to, but he came highly recommended by people she trusted.
“It’ll be adequate,” he said. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about. But you won’t be going any closer to the core than it says here, right?”
“That’s correct. But you’d prefer to see more shielding?”
“Technologically, this is about as effective as you can get.” They were standing at a viewport. “Once you’re there, you won’t be able to leave the ship, of course. Not even for a short time.”
“Okay. But the shielding will be sufficient?”
“Yes. The proper term, by the way, is armor. It will protect you.”
“All right.”
The prow of the McAdams was flat. The bridge viewports, buried in the armor, looked reptilian. “They can all be covered, closed off, and you must do that before you make your jump out there.”
“Okay.” She shook her head. “It looks like a shoe box.” With exhaust tubes sticking out of it. God help them if they got close to an omega.
Lou was all business. “Yes. They’ve armored the engines, too, so you can get to them if you have a problem.” He checked his notebook. “You’re aware they’ve been replaced.”
“Yes. I knew it would be necessary. Now I can see why.”
“Sure. With all that armor, the ship’s carrying too much mass for the original units. You have K-87s now. They have a lot more kick. In fact, you’ll get a smoother—and quicker—acceleration than you could before.”
“Same thing with the McAdams?”
“Right. One-twenty-sixes for the McAdams. It’s a bigger ship.”
It too looked like a crate.
Certification required a test run. Hutch watched from one of the observation platforms as Union techs took the Preston out and accelerated. They went to full thrust from cruise, and the tubes lit up like the afterburners of one of the big cargo ships. Lou was standing beside her, and before she could ask he reassured her. “It’s within the acceptable range of your exhaust tubes,” he said.
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. We’d have changed them out if there’d been any problem.”
November 11 was a Sunday. It was warm, dry, oppressive for reasons she couldn’t have explained. Hutch was guest speaker at the annual Virginia State Library Association luncheon. She’d just finished and was striding out into the lobby when her commlink vibrated.
It was Jon. “Thought you’d want to know,” he said. “I just got word from the contractors. The ships are ready to go.”
This will be my last night home for a while. Tomorrow I’ll stay at Union, then a Thursday launch. Back in the saddle again. Hard to believe.
Chapter 22
Antonio Giannotti had a wife and two kids. The kids were both adolescents, at that happy stage where they could simultaneously make him confident about the future while they were sabotaging the present. Cristiana was good with them, probably as adept at managing their eccentricities as one could hope. But it wasn’t easy on her. Antonio was gone a lot. He was always telling her he would be an editor or producer in the near future, and things would settle down. It was something they both knew would never happen because he had no real interest in sitting in front of a computer display. But they could fall back on it, treat it as something more solid than a fantasy, when they needed to. This was one of those times.
Cristiana tolerated his odd hours, his occasional forays to distant places, his abrupt changes of plans. But the galactic core was a bit much, even for her. “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” he told her. “It’s like being on the Santa Maria.”
“I know, Antonio,” she said. “I understand that. But seven or eight months? Maybe more?”
“After this, I’ll be up there with Clay Huston and Monica Wright.” They were the premier journalists of the age, courted by the networks, drifting on and off the big shows.
She didn’t care. She got weepy and wished he would reconsider. He’d be out there in the dark, nobody really knew where, out of touch. She wondered how many of Columbus’s crew had made it back to Spain. If something happened, she complained, she’d never know except that he wouldn’t come home. Let somebody else do it. “You don’t need to be Clay Huston,” she said. In the end, she hugged him, and the kids told him to be careful and said they’d miss him.
Antonio had spent thirty years as a journalist. He’d been a beat reporter in his early days, covering trials in Naples, and later in Palermo, and eventually the political circuit in Rome. He hadn’t been very good at it, and they’d shunted him off to the side, where he’d begun writing an occasional science column for Rome International. That was supposedly a dead end, an indication he was headed downhill, next stop the obituaries. But he’d shown a talent for explaining quantum physics in language people could actually understand. He began appearing on the networks, and quickly became “Dr. Science.” During that period he’d written Science for Soccer Fans, his only book, which was an effort to make the more arcane aspects of physics, chemistry, and biology accessible to the ordinary reader. The book had sold reasonably well and helped his reputation. Now he did the major science stories for Worldwide, and he was pleased with the way his career was going.
Why, then, was he making this flight to God knew where? To enhance his status? To be part of the science story of the decade? To collect material for a book that would jump off the shelves?
He wasn’t sure of the answer. To some extent, probably all of those reasons. But mostly he wanted to get serious meaning into his life. To get beyond the old boundaries. As a kid he’d been fascinated by the omega clouds, by the sheer malevolence behind a mechanism that seemed literally diabolical, a force that targeted not nature as a whole, but civilizations. An action that bestowed no imaginable benefit to whatever power had designed and unleashed the things.