“Yes, sir,” Commander Inanna said, and Anu threw himself into the central transit shaft. The shaft walls screamed past him, though he felt no subjective sense of motion, and his lips drew back in an ugly snarl. His first attempt had failed, but he had a trick or two of his own. Tricks even Druaga didn’t know about, Breaker take him!
Copper minnows exploded away from Dahak. Lifeboats crowded with loyal crew members fanned out over the glaciated surface of the alien planet, seeking refuge, and scattered among them were other, larger shapes. Still only motes compared to the ship itself, their masses were measured in thousands upon thousands of tons, and they plummeted together, outspeeding the smaller lifeboats. Anu had no intention of remaining in space where Druaga—assuming he was still alive—might recognize that he and his followers had not abandoned ship in lifeboats and use Dahak’s weapons to pick off his sublight parasites as easily as a child swatting flies.
The engineer sat in the command chair of the parasite Osir, watching the gargantuan bulk of the camouflaged mother ship dwindle with distance, and his smile was ugly. He needed that ship to claim his destiny, but he could still have it. Once the programs he’d buried in the engineering computers did their job, every power room aboard Dahak would be so much rubble. Emergency power would keep Comp Cent going for a time, but when it faded, Comp Cent would die.
And with its death, Dahak’s hulk would be his.
“Entering atmosphere, sir,” Commander Inanna said from the first officer’s couch.
Chapter Two
“Papa-Mike Control, this is Papa-Mike One-X-Ray, do you copy?”
Lieutenant Commander Colin MacIntyre’s radar pinged softly as the Copernicus mass driver hurled another few tons of lunar rock towards the catcher ships of the Eden Three habitat, and he watched its out—going trace on the scope as he waited, reveling in the joy of solo flight, for secondary mission control at Tereshkova to respond.
“One-X-Ray, Papa-Mike Control,” a deep voice acknowledged. “Proceed.”
“Papa-Mike Control, One-X-Ray orbital insertion burn complete. It looks good from here. Over.”
“One-X-Ray, that’s affirmative. Do you want a couple of orbits to settle in before initiating?”
“Negative, Control. The whole idea’s to do this on my own, right?”
“Affirmative, One-X-Ray.”
“Let’s do it, then. I show a green board, Pasha—do you confirm?”
“That’s an affirmative, One-X-Ray. And we also show you approaching our transmission horizon, Colin. Communications loss in twenty seconds. You are cleared to initiate the exercise.”
“Papa-Mike Control, One-X-Ray copies. See you guys in a little while.”
“Roger, One-X-Ray. Your turn to buy, anyway.”
“Like hell it is,” MacIntyre laughed, but whatever Papa-Mike Control might have replied was cut off as One-X-Ray swept beyond the lunar horizon and lost signal.
MacIntyre ran down his final check list with extra care. It had been surprisingly hard for the test mission’s planners to pick an orbit that would keep him clear of Nearside’s traffic and cover a totally unexplored portion of the moon’s surface. But Farside was populated only by a handful of observatories and deep-system radio arrays, and the routing required to find virgin territory combined with the close orbit the survey instruments needed would put him out of touch with the rest of the human race for the next little bit, which was a novel experience even for an astronaut these days.
He finished his list and activated his instruments, then sat back and hummed, drumming on the arms of his acceleration couch to keep time, as his on-board computers flickered through the mission programs. It was always possible to hit a glitch, but there was little he could do about it if it happened. He was a pilot, thoroughly familiar with the electronic gizzards of his one-man Beagle Three survey vehicle, but he had only the vaguest idea about how this particular instrument package functioned.
The rate of technical progress in the seventy years since Armstrong was enough to leave any non-specialist hopelessly behind outside his own field, and the Geo Sciences team back at Shepherd Center had wandered down some peculiar paths to produce their current generation of esoteric peekers and pryers. “Gravitonic resonance” was a marvelous term … and MacIntyre often wished he knew exactly what it meant. But not enough to spend another six or eight years tacking on extra degrees, so he contented himself with understanding what the “planetary proctoscope” (as some anonymous wag had christened it) did rather than how it did it.
Maneuvering thrusters nudged his Beagle into precisely the proper attitude, and MacIntyre bent a sapient gaze upon the read-outs. Those, at least, he understood. Which was just as well, since he was slated as primary survey pilot for the Prometheus Mission, and—
His humming paused suddenly, dying in mid-note, and his eyebrows crooked. Now that was odd. A malfunction?
He punched keys, and his crooked eyebrows became a frown. According to the diagnostics, everything was functioning perfectly, but whatever else the moon might be, it wasn’t hollow.
He tugged on his prominent nose, watching the preposterous data appear on the displays. The printer beside him hummed, producing a hard-copy graphic representation of the raw numbers, and he tugged harder. According to his demented instruments, someone must have been a busy little beaver down there. It looked for all the world as if a vast labyrinth of tunnels, passages, and God knew what had been carved out under eighty kilometers of solid lunar rock!
He allowed himself a muttered imprecation. Less than a year from mission date, and one of their primary survey systems—and a NASA design, at that!—had decided to go gaga. But the thing had worked perfectly in atmospheric tests over Nevada and Siberia, so what the hell had happened now?
He was still tugging on his nose when the proximity alarm jerked him up in his couch. Damnation! He was all alone back here, so what the hell was that?
“That” was a blip less than a hundred kilometers astern and closing fast. How had something that big gotten this close before his radar caught it? According to his instruments, it was at least the size of one of the old Saturn V boosters!
His jaw dropped as the bogie made a crisp, clean, instantaneous ninety-degree turn. Apparently the laws of motion had been repealed on behalf of whatever it was! But whatever else it was doing, it was also maneuvering to match his orbit. Even as he watched, the stranger was slowing to pace him.
Colin MacIntyre’s level-headedness was one reason he’d been selected for the first joint US-Soviet interstellar flight crew, but the hair on the back of his neck stood on end as his craft suddenly shuddered. It was as if something had touched the Beagle’s hull—something massive enough to shake a hundred-ton, atmosphere-capable, variable-geometry spacecraft.
That shook him out of his momentary state of shock. Whatever this was, no one had told him to expect it, and that meant it belonged to neither NASA nor the Russians. His hands flew over his maneuvering console, waking flaring thrusters, and the Beagle quivered. She quivered, but she didn’t budge, and cold sweat beaded MacIntyre’s face as she continued serenely along her orbital path, attitude unchanged. That couldn’t possibly be happening—but, then, none of this could be happening, could it?
He chopped that thought off and punched more keys. One thing he had was plenty of maneuvering mass—Beagles were designed for lengthy deployments, and he’d tanked from the Russkies’ Gagarin Platform before departure on his trans-lunar flight plan—and the ship shuddered wildly as her main engines came alive.
The full-power burn should have slammed him back in his couch and sent the survey ship hurtling forward, but the thundering engines had no more effect than his maneuvering thrusters, and he sagged in his seat. Then his jaw clenched as the Beagle finally started to move—not away from the stranger, but towards it! Whatever that thing on his radar was, it was no figment of his imagination.