He fell back and let the cocoon massage him as soothingly as it could.
Thuuud-screech, Thuuud-screech. The thrust felt more powerful than before, the tempo a bit faster. The thunder and groan of the drive made it nearly impossible for Pertin to think, but he had to think.
The problem on his mind was not any of the obvious ones: what to do about the Sheliaks, how to deal with the murderers, the completion of the mission. His mind worried at those a moment at a time and then let them go; they required action, not thought, and action was not available to him while the fusion rockets roared.
Instead, he thought about an unpleasant discovery. The discovery was that there wasn’t much in being a hero. His heroism had been entered into lightly enough, but he supposed that was not in itself rare; how many soon-to-be Medal of Honour winners had volunteered for combat patrols simply because they were bored with sitting in foxholes, and found themselves caught up in events which made them immortal reputations?
But his heroism was not even going to get him a medal. No one would ever really know what was happening on this ship, because it was absolutely certain there would be no survivors. Either Aurora’s mission would succeed, in which event the Galaxy at large would accept their sacrifice complacently, or it would fail. Then they would all be thought of, when they were thought of at all, as that sorry bunch that wasted themselves for nothing.
With the thud and rasp of metal roaring at him, his cocoon seesawing to the violent deceleration of the rockets, tired, half-sick, angry and hopeless, Ben James Pertin faced the fact that there was nothing left in his life anywhere that would give him one moment’s joy.
Another Ben Pertin tens of thousands of light-years away was trying to soothe his bride. He said, “Honey, I knew what I was getting into when I volunteered. I was willing to go through with it. That other me on the ship doesn’t feel any different about it.”
Zara Pertin said harshly, “That other you is going to die, Ben Charles.”
“But I’ll still be alive!”
“And he’ll be dead. Don’t you understand me? I love you! And he is you, and I don’t like to think about what is happening to him.” She turned over, giving her back a chance to collect some of the UV tan from the lamps overhead and took off her goggles. She said, “What’s it like there now, Ben?”
“Well—” he said.
“No, I want to know. Tell me.”
Ben Charles looked around the little simulated beach beside the great water tank that was their “ocean”. There was no one around but themselves. They’d come here for that reason, but Ben Charles found himself wishing for an interruption. She turned her head and looked at him, and he shrugged.
“All right. It’s bad,” he said. "The sensors in his acceleration cocoon report some destruction of the white corpuscles already.
Pretty soon he’ll start having nosebleeds, then he’ll bleed internally. He’ll be getting weaker, running a temperature, and before long he’ll die.” He paused, then answered the unspoken question. “Probably within a week.”
He propped himself up on one arm - easily enough; even here the effective gravity was only a fraction of Earth-normal. He looked out at the thousand-foot cusp of water, curving upward to meet the bulkhead at its far end and added: “That’s if he dies as a result of radiation, but he might not last that long. Some of the beings are getting violent. The electronic ones are malfunctioning, because the radiation affects their synapses. Insane, really. A lot of the organic ones are sick. All of them are scared. There - there have been deaths.”
“I should have gone with you,” Zara said thoughtfully.
“Oh, now, really! That’s stupid! What would be the point?”
“I would have felt better about it, and so would you. He.” She stood up, smiling, her mind made up. “If you have to go again, dear,” she said, “I’m going too. Now I’m hungry. Race you back to the apartment."
4
The tachyar verified the orbits of the little bodies orbiting Lambda; the mass estimates were right, thus the density estimates were right. Object Lambda’s average density was about that of a high vacuum. Nevertheless, it appeared to have a solid surface.
Pertin greeted the news with apathy. There were more immediately important developments on the ship, and the ultimate purpose for which the ship existed didn’t seem particularly interesting any more.
For one thing, the tachyon transmission chamber was shut down. For better or for worse, there would be no more imports, no additional beings, no new crewmembers, no nothing.
Its last function had been to bring in new structural members and drive units. Inside the former receiving chamber of the Aurora they were being assembled into a new, small ship. It took form as a squat, dense object, all fusion drive and instruments, with no living space for a crew. It would have no crew. It would carry nothing but itself, and the tachyon receiving crystal that had been the Aurora’s.
Pertin had no part in the construction project. The Boaty-Bits directed it, and the metal pseudogirl and a few other high-G types carried it out. He looked in on it once or twice. Besides the new members brought in on the tachyon receiver, before it was rehoused in its new body, the small ship used bulkheads and beams from Aurora itself. It seemed to Ben James Pertin that vital structural parts were being seriously weakened. As an engineer, that interested him. As a living human being whose life depended on the structural integrity of the Aurora, he didn’t even think it worth mentioning. Whatever was happening was planned. If the life of the Aurora was being shortened thereby, it was because the beings doing the planning had decided the ship was wholly expendable.
The only nonexpendable part of the Aurora now was the little drone being put together in its belly.
The drone comprised only three elements: a tiny tachyon receiving unit, built around the crystal from Aurora’s own, in a globular body fitted with weak handling propulsors, suitable only for correcting minor errors in the elements of an orbit. A thick half-shell of metal-bonded ceramics on one side, an ablation shield designed to flake and burn away, disposing of excess heat. And, outside the ablation shield, the enormous fusion-propulsion engines.
It was a high-deceleration drone. It would be launched from the mother ship at some point near Object Lambda. Its fusion jets would slow it radically. Stressed as it was, with no living creatures aboard, it could endure hundred-G delta-V forces. But Pertin’s engineer’s eye recognized the implications of the design. Even those forces would not be enough. The drone would make use of Object Lambda’s enormously deep atmosphere as well. It would dip into it, shedding velocity by burning it off as friction, blazing like a meteorite from its ablation surfaces. That frightful crunch would slow it to manageable relative speeds; as it came out of its first skip into Lambda’s air it would be near enough to orbital velocity for capture. Then its handling propulsors could take over the simpler job of neatening up the elements of the orbit, and a tachyon receiver would be in place around Object Lambda.
What about the mother ship?
All the evidence Pertin needed was there in the construction of the probe. If such forces were needed to put the probe in orbit, there was no hope that Aurora could join it. Its kilotons of mass were simply too great for the forces available to deal with. Even if the forces were available, its living cargo would be pulped by the delta-V.
Aurora would drop its cargo, flash by Object Lambda and continue through intergalactic space. It would no longer have fusion mass for its reactors. It would stop decelerating; to all intents and purposes, it would be only another chunk of intergalactic debris on a pointless orbit to nowhere.