He sat on the lounger and shuffled through the pix. The first three showed a young Indian girl in a blue dress. She was perhaps eight or nine years old. The other three pix were computer-generated images, showing Sita Mackendrick as she might appear today, aged twenty-three.
He laid the pix aside with a sigh. He had come to Earth from Homefall almost fourteen years ago on a mission more important to him than his own existence, and so far he had failed.
His one hope, now, was if he could find the woman who was Sita Mackendrick.
7
Bennett stood before the plate-glass window of the observation gallery and watched the activity on the apron far below. After all his years in space, his experience piloting ships to orbit, there was still something about the sight of vessels blasting off from Los Angeles spaceport that filled him with excitement.
He suspected it had something to do with childhood. As a kid he’d taken the coach from Mojave, against his father’s express instructions, to spend long afternoons watching ships lighting out for the stars. He had even brought Ella here once, his joy at the experience heightened by his sister’s obvious delight. He smiled to himself. It seemed a long time ago since he had dreamed of being a pilot; if only his younger self could have known that one day his dream would come true. He felt a twinge of sadness at the thought of how dreams fulfilled never satisfied the expectations of the dreamer. It had taught him never to dream, never to look too far into the future.
The spaceport was a vast concrete plain that stretched away in every direction as far as the eye could see. Every half-kilometre the surface was pocked by a blast crater, a sunken collar of steel flanges in which the ships and shuttles squatted preparatory to take-off. Many of the vessels in the immediate vicinity of the observation gallery were ground-to-orbit ships, bulbous bell-shaped tubs squatting on powerful, flexed stanchions. There were only four big companies now, competing to win the stars. There’d been dozens during his childhood, and he’d meticulously memorised the livery of every shipping line.
He watched as a supply shuttle rose from a nearby berth, and the thrill he recalled from childhood filled him now. The terminal building vibrated as if at the onset of an earthquake. He shielded his eyes from the blinding, actinic glare as the sleek ship powered into the lower atmosphere on the start of its journey to the orbitals.
He left the gallery and made his way through the crowded concourse of the terminal building, showed his pass to a security guard and stepped out on to the tarmac. He walked around the building, away from the ear-splitting roar of departing vessels, to the area given over to machine shops, repair yards and hangars. Various shipping lines and colonial companies hired compounds within the port, areas the size of football fields secured by carbon-fibre fences. Consulting the map he’d picked up from the information desk, Bennett moved through a maze of compounds to the lot on the map marked with the letter M shot through with an arrow.
To prepare himself, he had accessed GlobaLink and read more about the Mackendrick Foundation and Mackendrick himself. The Foundation had been set up by Mackendrick senior, Alistair, at the turn of the century, as a learning centre for a diverse set of scientific disciplines, all devoted to the discovery and understanding of other worlds. The initial idea was that the foundation should turn out multi-discipline scientists equipped to work on the many habitable planets of the Expansion. Over the years the aims of the foundation had broadened: under the direction of Charles Mackendrick, the foundation bought out a small shipping line in “56, and so the exploration arm of the company was founded.
The biography of Charles Mackendrick himself read like the synopsis of some improbable holo-vision adventure story for kids. Trained at the Space Academy on Mars, Mackendrick had graduated as a light-drive engineer at nineteen, specialising in the then recently developed Schulmann-Dearing propulsion systems. For five years he worked for various lines servicing the colonies, along the way picking up a pilot’s diploma. At twenty-five he’d become the youngest chief pilot of an exploration vessel, in the employ of the Trans-Planetary Company. He had served on teams that had discovered and opened up a dozen worlds for colonisation, and in “50 had been among the first party of humans to locate and make contact with sentient extraterrestrial life-forms, the aliens known as the Phalaan. Six years later he had taken over the directorship of the Mackendrick Foundation and initiated the interstellar explorations, for which it was now principally known.
Mackendrick himself was portrayed as a restless workaholic who until recently had lived for the exploration of uncharted space. A billionaire, he had retired from active planetary exploration just five years ago at the age of seventy.
He sounded, Bennett decided on finishing the hagiographic biography, just the type of person he’d rather avoid: thrusting, dynamic and aggressive. Bennett had never met a successful businessman he had actively liked, but perhaps his opinion had been negatively tainted by the influence of his father. Admittedly, his preconception of Mackendrick had been formed by reading between the lines, and watching the tape Mackendrick had sent last night, in which he’d come over as loud, overbearing and confident of getting whatever, and whoever, he wanted.
Bennett was unsure whether to be alarmed that the billionaire tycoon had singled him out for attention, or flattered. He did know that he was not exactly looking forward to the forthcoming meeting with Mackendrick.
A chain-link carbon-fibre fence enclosed the Mackendrick Foundation compound, a sunken repair yard littered with various bulky machine tools, heavy lifting equipment and ship parts. In pride of place in the centre of the pit was the silver stylised arrowhead of a Cobra-class exploration vessel.
Bennett gave his name and showed his pass to a guard at the gate. The guard clicked his jaw to open communications and spoke quickly, seemingly to himself. Seconds later he nodded and allowed Bennett through.
He took a zig-zag flight of steps down into the sunken compound, inhaling a heady stench of air fouled by the mixture of test-fire ionisation and laser welding. Pre-fab offices occupied the far end of the pit, but they appeared to be empty.
“Hello down there! Can I help you?”
He looked up. High above, leaning over the gantry that surrounded the Cobra, a small figure in engineer’s overalls waved down at him.
“I’m looking for Charles Mackendrick,” Bennett called.
“He won’t be long—should be back any time now. Care to come up?”
Bennett climbed up the gantry, passing the ship’s silver-muscled hydraulic stanchions, its curved flank excoriated by a million micro-meteorite impacts. The engineer was kneeling beside the swollen cowl of a booster nacelle, peering into its depths and periodically consulting a lighted com-board.
The engineer looked up. “Bennett, isn’t it? The pilot?”
Bennett nodded, surprised by the appearance of the engineer. From below, he had been unable to determine the man’s age, but at close quarters he appeared to be in his eighties, a slight man with balding grey hair and a thin face.
“Mack’s expecting you,” the engineer said. “He’s told me a lot about you. Hotshot pilot, by all accounts.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Bennett began, wondering how Mackendrick knew “a lot” about him.
“What do you know about Dearing boosters, Bennett? Taught you mechanics and systems operations at pilot school, didn’t they?”
Bennett wondered if this was part of the interview—to have a chief engineer grill him on basic mechanics. He entered into the spirit, knelt beside the engineer and peered into the nacelle.