It had been a long time since Dianne had flown the Terra Nova manually, and she was more than a little nervous. But she was a pilot first and foremost, trained to fly spacecraft long before she had been called upon to command a crew.
She powered up the navigation display and confirmed the flight path. Manual thruster controls on-line. Auxiliary engines at go. No need for main engines on this one—just a few light taps on the thrusters and the auxiliaries and they would be on the beam.
It wasn’t necessarily a one-way trip, of course. The folks back on Earth were learning a lot about manipulating the Charonian command system. NaPurHab’s passage showed that the folks at MRI knew how to open and shut a wormhole. Sooner or later, humans might well be able to shoo the COREs and SCOREs out of the way and pass freely through the wormhole to whatever lay beyond. Ursula Gruber’s cryptographic and linguistics staff seemed quite confident about the matter.
But confidence was no guarantee. After all, the Terra Nova had cast off from Earth five years ago, eager to explore the Multisystem, confident of return, never dreaming that she would not make planet-fall in all that time.
No. They had to assume this was to be a one-way trip. No looking back.
The relay satellite had been launched. It was programmed to perform highly precise station-keeping, keeping in exact alignment with the wormhole aperture. If all went well, they would launch an identical relay on the other side. The two relays were equipped with radio and comm lasers. In theory, they would be able to contact each other whenever the wormhole was open. With a fair amount of luck, Earth and the Terra Nova might be able to retain at least some sort of intermittent contact.
Dianne checked the countdown clock. Almost time.
Just a pilot, she told herself. You’re just a pilot moving a hunk of iron around the sky. Just get it where it’s supposed to be. Don’t think about all the people aboard, or that you’ve got their lives in your hands. Don’t think about what you might see on the other side, or how you got into this mess. Just fly this thing.
The clock moved down, moving too fast and too slow, both at once, the way all countdown clocks did. But then the numbers got to zero, and it was time. Back on Earth, some computer sent the commands to the Ghoul Modules, and the wormhole bloomed into being, dead ahead.
Dianne fired the engines, and the Terra Nova moved in.
Thirty
Rubicons
Gerald MacDougal watched the wormhole getting closer, surprised at how calm he was. He should have been terrified, his pulse pounding, the sweat thick on his body.
And yet he was not. Was he serenely confident they would make it? Was he so certain they were doomed that he had given himself up to death with calm and dignified resignation? Or was he so terrified that he could find no other reaction than absolute, blanket denial?
As the blazing un-blue-white circle of the wormhole aperture swelled forward, rushing toward them, like a wall in space they were just about to slam into, Gerald braced for the impact, his instincts telling him the ship was about to crash into the barrier that was not really there.
Gerald glanced up at the status displays. Dianne was flying at a much higher velocity than NaPurHab had used. Maybe that was wise. No sense remaining inside any longer than necessary. Or maybe it was downright suicidal.
But then they were in. No turning back. They had crossed their Rubicon; they were committed. The ship hit the un-blue-white, and dove into the wormhole. Gerald felt a sudden thrill of excitement. At last, at long last, the Terra Nova was living up to her name. She was off in search of New Worlds indeed.
Dianne Steiger drove the ship in, her whole attention, her whole soul, focused on the job of getting her ship in and down and through and out. The ship bucked and jittered as the complex tidal and gravitational forces inside the wormhole grabbed at it. Dianne was flying by the seat of her pants, the joystick in a death grip. Easy now, she told herself. No heroics. Just get it done. But hell, getting done would require heroics.
A secret part of her knew that, and gloried in it. She had been here before, after all. She had been in space when the Abduction struck, just inside the zone that the Charonian wormhole had swallowed up, flying a little cargo shuttle. A hundred meters further out from Earth and she would have been left behind in the Solar System. And she had brought her ship home, back to Earth, in a spectacular crash landing at Los Angeles Spaceport she had no right to have survived. She had lost her left hand in the crash, and had long since forgotten that her new one was a sprint-grown bud-clone. It didn’t matter. Because she had lived. She had beaten them all.
The secret soul of a certain kind of pilot lives for the thrills it does not get. It wants to fly to and past the ragged edge of disaster, to bring its craft through the greatest of perils, and yet escape. Pilots who flew winged craft back from orbit wanted to come to a smooth rolling stop right on the centerline, knowing that, by all rights, they ought to be part of the gooey dead slime in a fiery crater a kilometer short of the runway.
Pilots of that sort live to cheat death. Dianne had tasted that forbidden thrill back then, and God forgive her but she wanted it again. And she was getting it now.
Back then, she had flown through a wormhole because she had no choice. The Charonians had had it all their way. But now, today, was her chance to use their own damn wormhole to save her ship, the ship the Charonians were trying to kill.
So here she was again, up against a wormhole, the sweat standing out on her forehead, a strange, fierce anger in her heart, battling the forces that wanted to destroy her ship.
They were going to have to try a lot harder if they were going to kill a ship with Dianne Steiger at the controls. She could feel it. They were going to make it!
There. There, dead ahead, was the exit from the wormhole. Closer, closer, closer—
A shuddering thump and bump, and they were through. The wormhole snapped out of existence behind them, and they were there.
Wherever they were.
“We picked up the signal twenty minutes ago,” Sondra told the Autocrat. “Same pattern as with NaPurHab. The words TERRA NOVA TERRA NOVA TERRA NOVA coded into the wormhole activation command.”
“Interesting. Most interesting,” the Autocrat said. “It seems reassuring to know our friends on Earth were willing to send a habitat and a ship through.”
“Somewhat. Not all that much. Autocrat, once again, I must ask you to reconsider. You are a head of state. Do you really feel it is wise for you to leave your people, your nation behind? The odds are very good that we will die on the other end, or be stranded there.”
“But you are going,” the Autocrat said.
“It’s my job,” Sondra said. “I couldn’t send anyone in my place if I were unwilling to go myself.”
“My feelings exactly,” the Autocrat said. “I do not think any more need be said.”
Sondra nodded. “All right,” she said. “I know when I’m beaten. Not that it matters, of course.”
“Why not?” the Autocrat said, a little startled.
Sondra grinned, delighted to finally find a break in the man’s armor. She couldn’t resist pressing home her advantage. “You forget,” she said, “we’ve never done this before. You can’t go through a door you can’t get open. The only way this ship is going anywhere is if our team can successfully establish a stable wormhole link to the proper coordinates and tuning frequency on the first try. What do you think our odds are?”