Captain Dianne Steiger tried not to think about the next crew of ten she was sending out to likely death. But the Terra Nova’s survival, the mission, the people of Earth came first.
And so she spoke the words. “I want the Highwayman launched toward the CORE within a week.”
“Dianne—Captain—we can’t!” Gerald MacDougal protested. “We’d just be dooming another crew.”
“Then give me another choice, Gerald,” she snapped, turning to glare at him with desperate eyes.
Gerald stared right back at her. “At least let me break radio silence and contact Earth before we launch. It’s a million-to-one shot, but maybe they’ve come up with something. There’s no point in hiding out here anymore—that CORE is sure to have spotted us now. Hijacker was directly between us and the CORE. The CORE must have gotten a radar echo off us as well when it threw that beam onto Hijacker.”
“Tracking?” Dianne asked, not breaking eye contact with Gerald.
“Dr. MacDougal is right, Captain,” the tracking officer said. “There was a very strong direct pulse onto the hull. The CORE must have picked up the echo.”
Dianne knew that there was no realistic hope that Earth had come up with anything. After five years of utter failure, the researchers had all given up or gotten bogged down in blind alleys. She knew that even a brief, tight-beam radio transmission might be enough to spook the CORE, send it to the attack. There was no sense in delay, no rational reason to agree.
But—but even she was horrified at the idea of trying again. The second stealthship could only have a lower chance of success than the first.
For the CORE would know to watch for them now.
To hell with sense and rational reason. “Very well,” she said. “Go ahead and make your contact, Dr. MacDougal.”
She sighed and stared at the main screen and the brooding bulk of the CORE. After all, what harm could there be in waiting a day or two before sending a second crew to its certain death?
Two
Left overs
“Lucian Dreyfuss was my friend, and I was his. That’s something not a whole lotta people can say.
“A lot of people will tell you he was a real angry person, and yeah, that’s true. He always had a temper. But I bet no one else can tell you why he was so mad. Because he never thought he was good enough. He always thought he could do better. He was mad at himself. And then, when the Charonians came along, he hated them worse than anyone else. He wasn’t like the rest of us. Back then, right at the beginning, everyone else was too confused by them, or couldn’t believe in them, or couldn’t see that they were. We were scared of them. They made us feel so little and weak that there wasn’t any room left to feel anything more. Not Lucian. They didn’t scare him. They just got him mad…
“…See, at first, most people wanted to think the Charonian disaster just happened, like an earthquake. An act of God, see? Not Lucian. He could get his mind around the Charonians, understand they were an enemy, not some weird force of nature, way before anyone else.
“…The last job he did was to go down the Rabbit Hole. That’s what we call the shaft from the Lunar surface down to where the Lunar Wheel is. He went down in a suit, and they sent down a TeleOperator rig with Larry Chao running it to go with him. They were gonna hang some sensors on the Wheel so we could listen in. That part worked out okay, and we got a lot of data. But the… the [expletive] Charonians caught them. Chopped the [expletive] VR suit to ribbons, and just took Lucian. We saw it back on the surface through the VR suit’s video pickups. They grabbed him and ran down the [expletive] tunnel.
“…I still hear him screaming, sometimes, when I go to bed. They took him, and we never found out what happened to him. That’s the part that keeps my nightmares going. He just vanished off into the nowhere, off into fog and mystery. For my money, a guy who was that much alive deserves a better end than that.”
Marcia MacDougal glanced at her wristaid for at least the dozenth time as the chancellor droned on. She knew that she really shouldn’t do it. She knew it looked bad, that it was a disrespectful thing to do—especially for someone who was on the speaker’s platform. The man was due some respect, after all. Chancellor Daltry had been running Armstrong University forever. But it seemed to Marcia that he had been speaking for about the same period of time.
Damn it, why couldn’t the man finish? MacDougal wanted the ceremony to end so she could go—but she also knew she had to stay, and see the ceremony out.
Damnation! She should never have come back here. She should have stayed at the Pole, close to the action, ready to move. But yes, there was business to do back here, and yes, she had to be in the city for the Abduction Day ceremonies. She was, after all, a Conner, to use the slang term for a citizen of the Lunar Republic. Marcia was a refugee from Tycho Purple Penal, and thus an immigrant to the Lunar Republic. Like most immigrants, she took her citizenship seriously. She wanted to be here. It was an honor to be here.
But how could she have known that they would have picked now, today, to find something at the Pole? A breakthrough, Selby had said.
At least a possible breakthrough. She hadn’t been willing to say more than that.
“We mourn today,” Chancellor Daltry said, “for that which is lost in the sense of misplaced, out of reach, and also for that which is lost in the sense of being hopelessly, utterly gone. We mourn for the Earth, but retain every hope and expectation that she lives. But we mourn also the lives lost, the destroyed worlds of the Solar System, the end of our previous way of life. In a sense, we are speaking not only for our dead, but to them, telling them all the things we desperately need for them to hear.”
Nice old guy, Marcia thought, but does he have to go on and on? She went back to tuning out the words, and applauding when everyone else did. Pretending to listen was enough.
Marcia had said her own piece toward the beginning of the service. Surely that was all they could expect of her. Maybe not even that much.
There was no real need for her to remain. Maybe she could sneak off the stage without anyone noticing. But Marcia was a rather striking woman, tall and slender, with smooth perfect skin the color of mahogany. Her eyes were bright and clear, dark brown in color, set in a round, expressive face. She had grown her luxuriant black hair out these last few years, and she wore it in a single thick braid down the middle of her back. Normally, she didn’t mind being the sort of person people looked at, but right now it made it seem unlikely that she would able to thread her way across a stage full of chairs without causing a ruckus. She shifted in her seat, feeling restless—and even that movement was enough to prompt a loud squeak from her chair. No. Face it. She had to sit tight, and that was that.
At last the chancellor droned to a halt. Marcia applauded as briefly as she decently could, stood with the others, and then made her way off the platform. She slipped out through the edge of the departing crowd and hurried on her way.