“Our Terra Nova, on the other hand, was built for the sole purpose of exploration—but found herself forced into virtually every other role instead. By turns a mothballed hulk, a military craft, a rescue ship, a lifeboat, and many other things besides, she earned fame for doing all the things she was never meant to do.
“In one of the great ironies of the history of exploration, the ship built to search for and colonize new worlds trillions of kilometers from Earth instead found herself among any number of new and fertile worlds a mere stone’s throw away from Earth—and yet she dared not approach any of them, let alone take up orbit or send down landers.”
“Hijacker now five kilometers from the Close-Orbiting Radar Emitter.” The tracking officer kept up her steady, monotone reports. A half million kilometers away, the long stern chase was drawing to its close. Terra Nova might have built and launched Hijacker, but the mother ship was nothing but an observer now. There was nothing she could do to help. Captain Dianne Steiger stared at the main bridge screen, at the huge lump of rock that was the CORE, straining her eyes for the dim, tiny dot that was Hijacker, the frail, tiny ship that had departed the Terra Nova nearly a month before.
Her hands gripped the arms of her command chair hard, her fingers dug deep into its fabric. She longed for a cigarette, but she had smoked the last one on board two years before. The CORE and Hijacker might be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, but that didn’t make the little ship’s mission any less important. Hijacker’s crew had to succeed. They had to, or else it was time to change the Terra Nova’s name to the Flying Dutchman and be done with it.
The damnable COREs, the endless thousands of COREs, had prevented Dianne’s ship from approaching any planet for the last five years. The Terra Nova could not even return home to Earth, for Earth had been surrounded by its own swarm of COREs.
But this CORE was out in the depths of space, nowhere near a planet, all by itself, traveling between worlds on some unknowable task of its own. Maybe, just maybe, this one the men and women of the Terra Nova could take on.
“Hijacker now three kilometers from the CORE,” the tracking officer reported.
Dianne stared harder at the screen. Ah, there she was, just coming into view of the long-range infrared cameras. Even with all the enhancers cranked up all the way, Hijacker was nothing but a dim brown dot crawling into the picture frame. Staring at the image made Dianne’s eyes swim. She blinked to clear her vision, and found she had lost track of the hard-to-see blob of color. Then the Artificial Intelligence system, the Artlnt, running the display system threw a yellow target circle centered around Hijacker. Much better.
No need to throw any such circle around the CORE, of course. The alien ship was the size of an asteroid, and all too easy to see. In fact it was an asteroid. Perhaps even calling it an alien ship was a bit misleading. Dianne glanced to her left, where Gerald MacDougal was sitting, staring at the screen himself.
Gerald always argued, quite plausibly, that the CORE was as much crew and captain as it was ship, one semi-organic whole. Certainly the CORE was alive. More or less. Unless you chose to regard it wholly as a machine. Dianne sighed and gave it up. Nothing was ever clear when you were dealing with the Charonians. And even if they were the most deadly enemy that humanity had ever faced, and even if the Charonian’s utter failure to notice that humans existed was the one thing that kept humanity from being destroyed, there was something damn mortifying in the arrogant way the Charonians steadfastly ignored everything human. Cockroaches got more attention from humans than humans got from Charonians. Sometimes Dianne thought it would be a victory just to get the other side to acknowledge the existence of humans.
“Any change in radar emissions?” Gerald asked. Any shift in radar could be a warning that the CORE had spotted Hijacker. The Terra Nova was not putting out any radar herself, but the ship’s passive detectors were tuned and focused, watching the CORE’s emissions for any changes caused either by the CORE’s beams being deflected or by the CORE changing its active search pattern.
“No, sir. No change in radar emissions, no target-induced shift in outgoing beam. No new activity that we can detect.”
That was good news, or at least the absence of bad news. CORE stood for “Close-Orbiting Radar Emitter.” This one was not in close orbit of anything at the moment, but it sure as hell was emitting radar like crazy.
The radar was meant to detect any object large enough to threaten whatever planet the CORE happened to be protecting. If it detected a threatening meteor, the CORE would shift course and smash itself into the incoming rock, knocking the rock off course, if not smashing it to bits.
Such protection was necessary. Earth’s new home, the Multisystem, was full of spaceborne debris and clouds of dust, thick enough in places that comm lasers would not work. Terra Nova‘s lasers had not been able to punch through to Earth for weeks. The ship had been in radio silence for all that time as well, for fear of attracting the CORE’s attention.
The best estimate was that there was between fifty and five hundred times as much skyjunk as in the Solar System. Dianne shifted nervously. As if she needed something else to worry about, something else she could do nothing about. There was no real way to know that the Solar System had survived, and plenty of reason to fear that it had not.
But best to focus on the problem at hand. Counting the Earth, there were at least 157 planets in the Multisystem, and every last one of them was surrounded by a cloud of COREs. The COREs were a first-rate defense against asteroids, but the damned things went after ships and landing craft just as relentlessly, swarming out to smash into any craft whose projected course intercepted a planet. The Terra Nova dared not get within three hundred thousand kilometers of any of those 157 planets. There was no danger of starvation, of the ship dying, of course: Terra Nova was designed to cross the dark between the stars, and Earth could still send the occasional outbound resupply ship. The COREs did not seem to care about objects moving out from a planet—most of the time. Something like half the outbound supply cargoes made it through.
No, survival was not the issue—the question was one of the ship’s usefulness, of its meaning. What was the point of a starship that could not get near a planet? Terra Nova had long since learned all she could about the Charonians from 300,000 kilometers away.
But Hijacker might be the key. If the small, stealthy ship could land on this CORE undetected, if her crew could make use of the tiny scraps of information that were all humanity knew about the COREs specifically and the Charonians generally, it was just possible they could take over the CORE, learn how to control it. Then maybe, just maybe, they could find a way to make all the COREs back off, find a way that would allow the Terra Nova to send landing craft to explore some of those worlds. Earth could launch new spacecraft, and humanity would have a chance to rebuild the orbital facilities that had been destroyed.