Everyone applauded, and somebody suggested in a deliberately slurred voice that the occasion called for another toast. The noise turned to laughter and Beekman passed around the apple juice. They were in fact a sober lot.
Marcel Clairveau wanted to get a job in management but expected to spend the rest of his life piloting superluminals for the Academy. Prior to that, he'd worked for Kosmik, Inc., shuttling personnel and supplies out to Quraqua, which Kosmik was terraforming. But he hadn't liked the people running the organization, who were both autocratic and incompetent. When it reached a point at which he was embarrassed to reveal for whom he worked, he'd resigned, done a brief stint as an instructor at Overflight, had seen an opportunity with the Academy, and had taken it.
Marcel was a Parisian, although he'd begun life on Pinnacle. He had been the second child born on an extrasolar planet. The first, a girl, also born on Pinnacle, had received all kinds of gifts, up to and including a free education.
"Let it be a lesson," his father had been fond of telling him. "Nobody remembers who Columbus's first mate was. Always go for the top job."
It had been a running joke between them, but Marcel had seen the wisdom in the remark, and now a variation of it hung over the desk in his quarters. Jump in or sit down. Not very poetic, but it reminded him to leave nothing to chance.
His father had been disappointed with the aimlessness of his adolescent years, and he'd died while Marcel was still adrift, undoubtedly convinced his wayward offspring would do nothing substantial with his life. He'd put Marcel into a small college at Lyon, where they specialized in recalcitrant students. And they'd introduced him to Voltaire.
It might have been his father's unexpected death, or Voltaire, or a math instructor in his sophomore year who unfailingly believed in him (for reasons Marcel never understood), or Valeric Guischard, who had told him point-blank she would not allow herself to become involved with a man with no future. Whatever had caused it, Marcel had decided to conquer the world.
He hadn't quite achieved that, but he was captain of a superlu-minal. He'd been too late to capture Valeric, but he knew no woman would ever again walk away from him because he had nothing to offer.
Starships, however, had turned out to be less romantic than he'd expected. His life, even with the Academy, had devolved into hauling passengers and freight from world to world with monotonous regularity. He'd hoped to pilot the survey ships that went out beyond the bubble, that went to places no one had ever seen before, like the Taliaferro, which had come out twenty-one years ago and found Morgan. That was the kind of life he wanted. But those were compact ships, and the pilots also tended to be part of the working crew. They were astrophysicists, exobiologists, climatologists, people who could carry their weight during a mission., Marcel could run the ship and in a pinch repair the coffeemaker. He was a skilled technician, one of the few pilots who could do major repairs under way. That skill counted for a great deal, but it was one more reason why the Academy liked him on flights that carried large numbers of passengers.
Marcel had found himself living a curiously uneventful life.
Until- Morgan.
Because the collision would be a head-on, a kind of cosmic train wreck, Maleiva 111 was not yet feeling the gravitational effects of the approaching giant. Nor was it yet more than a bright star in her skies. "Nothing much will change down there," Beekman predicted, "until the last forty hours or so. Then"-he rubbed his hands with anticipation-"Katie bar the door."
They were over the night side. Filmy clouds floated below them, limned by starlight. Here and there they could see oceans or snow-covered landmasses.
The Wendy jay was moving east in low orbit. It was early morning again aboard ship, but a substantial number of the researchers were up, crowded around the screens. They ate snacks and drank an endless supply of coffee in front of the displays, watching the sky brighten as the ship approached the terminator.
Marcel's crew consisted of two people. Mira Amelia was his technical specialist, and Kellie Collier was copilot. Kellie had taken the bridge when he went to bed. But sleeping had been difficult. There was too much excitement on the ship, and he hadn't dozed off until almost one. He woke again several hours later, tossed and turned for a while, gave it up, and decided to shower and dress. He'd developed a kind of morbid interest in the approaching fireworks. The realization irritated him because he'd always thought of himself as superior to those who gape at accidents.
He'd tried to convince himself that he was simply showing a scientific interest. But there was more to it than that. There was something that ran deep into the bone with the knowledge that an entire planetload of living things was going about their normal routines while disaster approached.
He turned on his monitor and picked up one of the feeds from project control. The screen filled with the endless arc of the ocean. A snow squall floated uncertainly off one edge of the cloud cover.
They were over snowcapped mountains, which in the distance subsided into an endless white plain.
It wasn't possible to see the Quiveras dust cloud. Even on the superluminal, they needed detectors to tell them it was there. Yet its effect had been profound. Take it away, and Maleiva III would have been a tropical world.
They were passing over a triangle-shaped continent, the largest on the planet. Vast mountain ranges dominated the northern and western coasts, and several chains of peaks formed an irregular central spine. The landmass stretched from about ten degrees north latitude almost to the south pole. Its southern limits were of course not visible to the naked eye because it simply connected with the mass of antarctic ice. Abel Kinder, one of the climatologists on board, had told him that even in normal times there was probably an ice bridge to the cap.
He found Beekman sitting in his accustomed chair on the bridge, charting with Kellie and drinking coffee. They were looking down as the last of the mountains passed out of the picture. A herd of animals moved deliberately across the plain.
"What are they?" Marcel asked.
Beekman shrugged. "Fur-bearing something-or-others," he said. "The local equivalent of reindeer. Except with white fur. Did you want me to bring up the archives?"
It wasn't necessary. Marcel had just been making conversation. He knew that the animals on Deepsix were by and large variations on well-established forms. They had all the usual organs, brains, circulatory systems, a tendency toward symmetry. A lot of exoskeletons here. Heavy bone on both sides of the wrapper. Most plants used chlorophyll.
Insects on Deepsix ranged all the way up to beasts the size of a German shepherd.
Detail was lacking because, as the whole world knew, the Nightingale expedition nineteen years ago had been attacked by local wildlife on its first day. No one had been on the ground since. Research had been limited to satellite observations.
"It's a pleasant enough world," said Beekman. "It would have made a good prospect for your old bosses."
He meant Kosmik, Inc., whose Planetary Construction Division selected and terraformed worlds for use as human outposts. "Too cold," said Marcel. "The place is a refrigerator."
"Actually it's not bad near the equator. And in any case it's only temporary. Another few centuries and it would have been away from the dust and everything would have gone back to normal."
"I don't think my old bosses were much at taking the long view."
Beekman shrugged. "There aren't that many suitable worlds available, Marcel. Actually, I think Deepsix would have been rather a nice place to take over."
The plains turned to forest and then to more peaks. Then they were out over the sea again.