"And at night?"
"One step at a time," she repeated.
She kissed him lingeringly on the steps to her living cubicle and for a moment it seemed that the voices were back. Inside she undressed quickly, cleaned her teeth, climbed gratefully into her bed. They came to her in her dreams.
"Sheba, Sheba."
"We need you, Sheba."
"Please, please, Sheba."
"Sheba, Sheba, Sheba."
CHAPTER SIX
Lieutenant Angela Bardeen pinned the twin suns first on one of Joshua Webster's shoulders and then the other. Finished, she stepped back and gave him a snappy salute. They were alone in Josh's office. The newly opened letter confirming his promotion lay on his desk.
"Very becoming, sir," Angela said.
Josh stepped forward, lifted her from her feet in an embrace, and kissed her.
"I would have expected more reserve in a senior officer," she teased.
"Tonight we celebrate," he said. "We'll have dinner at that place you like so well."
She pouted. "You always said it was too expensive."
"We'll blow my first month's pay increase."
She placed her palm on his forehead. "Well, you're not feverish."
He spanked her playfully on the rounded rump. The light slap was simultaneous with a thundering explosion that knocked the wall pictures askew and caused a suspended model of an X&A battle cruiser to sway on its hanging.
"What the devil?" Josh yelped.
Angela was on the communicator immediately. She listened for a few moments. "Some clown buzzed headquarters at supersonic speed."
"Well, they'll have his balls," Josh said. "They did identify him, of course."
Angela frowned. "I'm afraid not."
"You're kidding me."
"Sorry, no."
"Someone busts through the busiest air lanes in the galaxy at speed, rattles the windows of X&A headquarters, and he wasn't identified? What the hell, was he invisible?"
Admiral Julie Roberts and the X&A brass had substantially the same question. Captain Josh Webster was directed to find the answer.
"Captain," said the shift supervisor at Port Xanthos Control, "it was almost as if the sonofabitch was invisible."
"He couldn't have been going that fast," Josh said, "not and keep his hull intact."
"It wasn't that he was going all that fast," the supervisor said. "We had him on screen for a few seconds, long enough to measure his velocity. The speed isn't what bothers me. Any ship with a halfway decent flux drive could manage the speed. The question is, how did he drive into and out of the atmosphere at that rate without ablating his hull." He turned to a table, lifted a holoflat, handed it to Josh. "The automatic equipment snapped thirty or forty exposures. This is typical."
The glowing blur of a fireball was centered in the picture. "Computer enhancement?" Josh asked.
The supervisor handed him another holoflat. The central image was fuzzy and shapeless, nothing more than a concentration of light.
"What's your guess?" Josh asked.
"Sir, I don't know. It would be comforting if I could say it was a meteor.
But this thing seemed to materialize out of thin air. Tracking started less than fifty miles to the east at an altitude of a hundred and fifty thousand feet. The track arced down to pass headquarters at two thousand feet and then went vertical."
"Sit down, Captain," Admiral Julie Roberts said. Josh nodded, obeyed.
The admiral looked at him expectantly. "Well?" she asked.
"There seemed to be a tendency to brush off the incident as anunexplained anomaly," Josh said.
"That just won't do, Captain," Julie said sharply.
Josh spread his hands. "Something was there, obviously, something with mass to create a sonic boom and make an image on the detector screens. Any vessel with a fairly modern flux drive could match the speed, but at the expense of burning away so much insulation that it would break up."
"Josh, the whole place is buzzing," the admiral said. "You wouldn't believe some of the speculation that is going on."
"I can imagine," Josh said.
"We're sitting at the bottom of the most tightly controlled air and approach space in the U.P.," Julie said. "The volume of traffic dictates not just one extra-atmospheric layer of control but three. At peak times there's often a hold of hours on a ship wanting to land on Xanthos, and with three layers of approach control in near space a rock the size of your fist couldn't get through into atmosphere undetected."
"Something did," Josh said grimly.
Julie placed delicate fingers alongside her chin and stared moodily out of a window. The galaxy was big. Although man had been in space for thousands of years, it was still largely unexplored. And beyond the scattered rim stars at the edge of the Milky Way the bleak void of extragalactic space began. On the colossal scale of the universe man's little galaxy was an insignificance. Man himself? He was a frail creature, made of ephemeral stuff. He blustered himself outward from his small worlds, going armed and apprehensive, for although he was alone there was daunting evidence that others had gone before him. She had seen the Dead Worlds plying their eternal orbits in the hard, radiative glare of the core mass. She had read the Miaree manuscript, the chilling account of the death of two races; and she had come into contact with Erin Kenner's world. Intelligent species had come and gone in the home galaxy and one could only guess about the billions of possibilities offered in other areas of the cosmos. And to all races known to man had come death. Devastation.
Genocide.
The far-ranging ships of the Department of Exploration and Alien Search went armed. Man knew his own nature. Long ago he had loosed the nuclear thunderbolts on Old Earth; and in the Zede War he had shattered worlds. When he ventured into the nothingness of unexplored space he looked over his shoulder, for there was always, embedded in his mind, the dread of meeting something like himself, or something like the beings who had not only eradicated biological life from the Dead Worlds but had cooled the inner fires of the planets.
"Well, Josh," she said, finally, "was it an alien probe?"
Josh shrugged. "Makes you think, doesn't it, sir?"
"I don't think we'll be able to say definitely what it was, not with the data we have."
"I'm afraid not," Josh said.
She turned to him, smiled. "But it's not your job to investigate unexplained flying objects, Captain."
"Still, if there's anything I can do—"
"There is," she said, standing, reaching for a Service blue envelope that measured eight by ten inches. She walked around the desk and handed it to Josh, who had risen with her.
"Your new command, Captain," she said.
Josh grinned boyishly. He lifted the flap of the envelope and pulled the contents partially out, exposing the thick, blue silk paper of a ship's commission. His fingers trembled as he read the name, Erin Kenner.
"Admiral," he said, "I'm speechless." The Erin Kenner was X&A's newest, a cruiser-explorer of the new Discoverer class. She was only the fourth of her type to come out of the yards on Eban's Forge. Named, as were her predecessors, for independent space explorers, she had the muscle and the reserves to go anywhere in the galaxy. She, and others in her class, were miniature Rimfires, equipped with state of the art detectors, armed with enough firepower to meet any known or imagined threat.
"A crew has been assigned," Julie said. "You may choose your ownofficers."
"Admiral, thank you," he said, extending his hand.
"Thanks are unnecessary," Julie said stiffly. "Your selection was based on merit." She smiled. "I envy you, Josh. There are times, sitting here at this damned desk, when I wish I were your age with twin suns on my shoulders, a good ship around me, and all of space before me."
"I'd gladly sail under your command, Admiral," Josh said.
"Go on," she said, "get the hell out of here."
"Yes, sir."