“What do you suggest, Captain?” asked Pete after a long hesitation. “Can you run a diagnostic to determine whether the intercept is valid?”
“We’ve done that. Bill doesn’t see a problem anywhere.” But of course if Bill himself were the problem—
“All right. What else can we try?”
“We could reconfigure the satellites and launch them to look for it. Then we go back to our routine mission. And when it’s over we go home.”
Pete didn’t look very happy with the strategy. “What about the satellites?”
“If they find something, they’ll forward the results.”
“You still think it’ll take that long?”
“I’m sorry, Pete. But there’s really no easy way to do it.”
“How many satellites?” There were only seven left. He was going to have to sacrifice parts of the program.
“The more we put out there, the better the chance.”
“Do it,” said Pete. “Put them all out. Well, maybe save one or two.”
Chapter 1
June 2224
People tend to believe that good fortune consists of equal parts talent, hard work, and sheer luck. It’s hard to deny the roles of the latter two. As to talent, I would only say it consists primarily in finding the right moment to step in.
PRISCILLA HUTCHINS WAS not a woman to be swept easily off her feet, but she came very close to developing a terminal passion for Preacher Brawley during the Proteus fiasco. Not because of his good looks, though God knew he was a charmer. And not because of his congeniality. She’d always liked him, for both those reasons. If pressed, though, she would probably have told you it had to do with his timing.
He wasn’t really a preacher, of course, but was, according to legend, descended from a long line of Baptist fire breathers. Hutch knew him as an occasional dinner companion, a person she saw occasionally coming in or going out of the Academy. And perhaps most significantly, as a voice from the void on those interminable flights to Serenity and Glory Point and Faraway. He was one of those rare individuals with whom one could be silent, and still feel in good company.
The important thing was that he had been there when she desperately needed him. Not to save her life, mind you. She was never in real danger herself. But he took a terrible decision out of her hands.
The way it happened was this: Hutch was aboard the Academy ship Wildside en route to Renaissance Station, which orbited Proteus, a vast hydrogen cloud that had been contracting for millions of years and would eventually become a star. Its core was burning furiously under the pressures generated by that contraction, but nuclear ignition had not yet taken place.
That was why the station was there. To watch, as Lawrence Dimenna liked to say, the process. But there were those who felt Renaissance was vulnerable, that the process was unpredictable, and who’d attempted to close it down and withdraw its personnel. It was not a place Hutch was anxious to visit.
The wind blew all the time inside the cloud. She was about a day away, listening to it howl and claw at her ship. She was trying to concentrate on a light breakfast of toast and fruit when she saw the first sign of what was to come. “It’s thrown off a big flare,” said Bill. “Gigantic,” he added. “Off the scale.”
Unlike his sibling AI on the Benjamin Martin, Hutch’s Bill adopted a wide range of appearances, using whatever he felt most likely to please, annoy, or intimidate, as the mood struck him. Theoretically, he was programmed to do so, to provide the captain with a true companion on long flights. She was otherwise alone on the ship.
At the moment, he looked like the uncle that everybody likes but who has a tendency to drink a bit too much and who has an all-too-obvious eye for women.
“You think we’re actually going to have to do an evacuation?” she asked.
“I don’t have sufficient data to make a decent estimate,” he said. “But I’d think not. I mean, the place has been here a long time. Surely it won’t blow up just as we arrive.”
It was an epitaph if she’d ever heard one.
They couldn’t see the eruption without sensors, of course. Couldn’t see anything without sensors. The glowing mist through which the Wildside moved prevented any visuals much beyond thirty kilometers.
It was hydrogen, illuminated by the fire at the core. On her screens, Proteus was not easily distinguishable from a true star, save for the twin jets that rose out of its poles.
Hutch looked at the display images, at the vast bursts of flame roiling through the clouds, at the inferno rendered somehow more disquieting than that of a true star, perhaps because it had not even the illusion of a definable edge, but rather seemed to fill the universe.
When seen from outside the cloud, the jets formed an elegant vision that would have been worthy of a Sorbanne, beams composed of charged particles, not entirely stable, flashed from a cosmic lighthouse that occasionally changed its position on the rocks. Renaissance Station had been placed in an equatorial orbit to lessen the possibility that a stray blast would take out its electronics.
“When do they expect the nuclear engine to cut in?” she asked.
“Probably not for another thousand years,” said Bill.
“These people must be crazy, sitting out here in this soup.”
“Apparently conditions have worsened considerably during the past forty-eight hours.” Bill gazed down at her in his smugly superior mode and produced a noteboard. “It says here they have a comfortable arrangement. Pools, tennis courts, parks. Even a seaside retreat.”
Had Proteus been at the heart of the solar system, the thin haze of its outer extremities would have engulfed Venus. Well, maybe engulfed wasn’t quite the right word. Enshrouded, maybe. Eventually, when the pressure reached critical mass, nuclear ignition would occur, the outer veil of hydrogen would be blown away, and Proteus would become a class-G, possibly a bit more massive than the sun.
“Doesn’t really matter how many parks they have if that thing has gone unstable.”
The AI let her see that he disapproved. “There is no known case of a class-G protostar going unstable. It is subject to occasional storms, and that is what we are seeing now. I think you are unduly worried.”
“Maybe. But if this is normal weather, I wouldn’t want to be here when things get rough.”
“Nor would I. But if a problem develops while we’re there, we should be able to outrun it easily enough.”
Let’s hope.
It was unlikely, the dispatching officer had assured her, that an Event would occur. (He had clearly capitalized the word.) Proteus was just going through a hiccup period. Happens all the time. No reason to worry, Hutchins. You’re there simply as a safety factor.
She’d been at Serenity, getting refitted, when the call had come. Lawrence Dimenna, the director of Renaissance Station, the same Dimenna who’d insisted just two months ago that Proteus was perfectly safe, as dependable as the sun, who’d argued to keep the place going against the advice of some of the top people at the Academy, was now asking for insurance. So let’s send old Hutchins over to sit on the volcano.
And here she was. With instructions to stand by and hold Dimenna’s hand and if there’s a problem, see that everyone gets off. But there shouldn’t be a problem. I mean, they’re the experts on protostars and they say everything’s fine. Just taking a precaution.
She’d checked the roster. There were thirty-three crew, staff, and working researchers, including three graduate students.
Accommodations on the Wildside would be a bit tight if they had to run. The ship was designed for thirty-one plus the pilot, but they could double up in a couple of the compartments and there were extra couches around that could be pressed into service during acceleration and jump phases.