MacIntyre watched it go, then turned away and consulted his built—in inertial guidance system. The terrain looked rough to his enhanced eyes, but not rugged enough to inconvenience him. He hooked his thumbs into the knapsack straps and set out, moving like a bit of the blackness brought to life.
It took him an hour to top out on a ridge with a direct view of Colorado Springs, and he paused. Not because he needed a rest, but because he wanted to study the glowing lights spread out below him.
The mushrooming space effort had transformed Colorado Springs over the past forty years. Venerable old Goddard Center still guided and controlled NASA’s unmanned deep-system probes and handled a lot of experimental work, but Goddard was too small and long in the tooth to keep pace with the bustling activity in near-Earth space. Just the construction activity around the Lagrange Point habitats would have required the big, new facilities, like the Russians’ Klyuchevskaya Station, ConEurope’s Werner von Braun Space Control, or the Canadian-American Shepherd Space Center at Colorado Springs.
The city had become the nation’s number three growth area, ballooning out to envelope the old military installations before surging on into the mountains beyond, and the gargantuan sprawl of Shepherd Center-centered on one-time Peterson Air Force Base-gleamed to the east, seething with activity despite the late hour. Shepherd was primarily a control center, without the hectic heavy-lift launches that streaked day and night skies over bases like Kennedy, Vandenburg, and Corpus Christi, but he could see the landing lights of a Valkyrie personnel shuttle sweeping in for a landing and another taxiing to a launch area, heavy with booster pods. The view was silent with distance, but memory and imagination supplied the noises and the bustle, the frenetic effort that sometimes threatened to reduce the wonder of space to a grinding routine.
He opened the binocular case hanging from his neck. There were limits even to his magic vision, but the device he raised to his eyes was as different from a standard pair of electronic binoculars as those were from an eighteenth-century spyglass, and the distant space center was suddenly at arm’s length.
He watched the airborne Valkyrie flare out on final approach, its variable sweep wings fully forward. He could almost hear the whine of the spoilers, the sudden snarl of the reversed thrusters, and it was odd how exciting and powerful it all still seemed. The two-hundred-ton bird moved with strong, purposeful grace, and he saw it through two sets of eyes. One remembered his own experiences, barely six months in the past, when that sleek shape had seemed an expression of the very frontier of human knowledge; the other had seen Dahak and recognized the quaint, primitive inefficiency of the design.
He sighed and moved his viewpoint over the sprawling installation, zooming in to examine details that caught his eye. He sat motionless for long, long minutes, absorbing the familiarity of his eventual objective and wondering.
He was a bit surprised by how normal it all looked, but only briefly. He was aware of how monumentally the universe had been changed, but the thousands of people hustling about Shepherd were not. Yet there was a hesitance in him, a disinclination to plunge back into intercourse with his own kind. He’d felt the same sensation before after extended missions, but now it was far stronger.
He made a wry face and lowered the binoculars, wondering what he’d expected to see through them. The link he sought was hardly likely to stand on top of White Tower or McNair Center and wave a lighted placard at him, for God’s sake! But deep inside, he knew he’d been looking for some sign that he was still part of them. That those hurrying, scurrying people were still his when all was said. But he wouldn’t see that sign, because they no longer truly were. They were his people, but not his kind, and the distinction twisted him with another stab of that bittersweet regret.
He put away the binoculars, then hitched up the waist of the blue jeans Dahak had provided. Uncaring stars twinkled down with detached disinterest, and he shivered as wind drove sea—like waves across the grass and he thought of the deadly menace sweeping closer beyond those distant points of light. His new body scarcely felt the cold mountain air, but the chill within was something else.
This world, that starscape, were no longer his. Perhaps it was always that way? Perhaps someone always had to give up the things he knew and loved to save them for others?
Philosophy had never been Colin MacIntyre’s strong suit, but he knew he would risk anything, lose anything to save the world he had lost. It was a moment of balance, of seeing himself for what he was and the mutineers for what they were: a hindrance. A barrier blocking his single hope of protecting his home.
He shook himself, conscious of a vast sense of impatience. There was an obstacle to be removed, and he was suddenly eager to be about it.
He started hiking once more. It was forty kilometers to his destination, and he wanted to be there by dawn. He needed an ally, and there was one person he could trust—or, if he could not, there was no one in the universe he could—and he wondered how Sean would react when his only brother returned from the dead?
Book Two
Chapter Seven
Dawn bled in the east, and the morning wind was cold as the sandy-haired hiker paused by the mailbox. He studied the small house carefully, with more than human senses, for it was always possible Anu and his mutineers had not, in fact, bought the official verdict on the late Colin MacIntyre.
The morning light strengthened, turning the cobalt sky pewter and rose-blush blue, and he detected absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. His super-sensitive ears recognized the distant thunder of the Denver-Colorado Springs magtrain as it tore through the dawn. Somewhere to the west a long-haul GEV with an off-balance skirt fan whined down the highway. The rattle and clink of glass counter-pointed the hum of a milk truck’s electric motor and birds spoke softly, but every sound was as it should have been, without menace or threat.
Devices within his body sampled far more esoteric data—electronic, thermal, gravitonic—and found nothing. It was possible Anu’s henchmen had contrived some observation system even he couldn’t detect, but only remotely.
He shook himself. He was wasting time, trying to postpone the inevitable.
He adjusted his “knapsack” and walked briskly up the drive, listening to the scrunch of gravel underfoot. Sean’s ancient four-wheel-drive Cadillac Bushmaster was in the carport, even more scratched and dinged than the last time he’d seen it, and he shook his head with an indulgent, off-center smile. Sean would go on paying the emission taxes on his old-fashioned, gasoline-burning hulk until it literally fell apart under him one day. Colin had opted for the glitz, glitter, and excitement of technology’s cutting edge while Sean had chosen the Forestry Service and the preservation of his environment, but it was Sean who clung to his pollution—producing old Caddy like death.
His boots fell crisp and clean in the still morning on the flagged walk, and he opened the screen door onto the enclosed front porch and stepped up into it. He felt his pulse race slightly and automatically adjusted his adrenalin level, then reached out and, very deliberately, pressed the doorbell.
The soft chimes echoed through the house, and he waited, letting his enhanced hearing chart events. He heard the soft thud as Sean’s bare feet hit the floor and the rustle of cloth as he dragged on a pair of pants. Then he heard him padding down the hall, grumbling under his breath at being disturbed at such an ungodly hour. The latch rattled, and then the door swung open.
“Yes?” his brother’s deep voice was as sleepy as his eyes. “What can I—”