Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Simply to sit down at a computer console and plunge into the task without preparation was absurd. It was as if she had decided to crack the Rosetta stone in one afternoon.

But she had a few distinct advantages over Champollion and the other Rosetta detectives: computers. In VISOR’s main computer system, she had highly sophisticated pattern-recognition programs at her command. The twenty-one-centimeter signal seemed to be binary in nature, a series of zeroes and ones, ideal for computer manipulation. The number-crunching side of the problem would be straightforward enough.

But even with all that said, the task should have taken months, perhaps years to crack. If Marcia had been in a truly rational state of mind, rather than merely struggling to maintain a veneer of rationality over her panic and despair, she might have realized that, and never even made the attempt.

It was perfectly ridiculous even to try.

And downright absurd that she cracked the first stage of the message in fifteen minutes.

Coyote Westlake woke up with a pounding headache, slumped in a corner of her habitat shed. What the hell had she been drinking last night? Lying there without moving a muscle, she carefully reviewed the night before. Wait a second , she thought. I didn’t have anything to drink. I haven’t had a drink in weeks . There was a very good reason for that: there wasn’t a drop of booze left in the hab shed or the ship.

Clearly something was wrong. She had to think this out. But the reflexes of an experienced drinker had taught her to keep her eyes shut when she found herself in this sort of position, being careful not to move a muscle while she took stock of her situation. Getting up and moving was a quick invitation to particularly messy forms of vertigo—especially in zero gee. She lay still, eyes shut, and tried to remember.

If she hadn’t been drinking the night before, then this was not a hangover. She had gone to bed early and stone cold sober, in a good mood even. Then what the hell had happened? She needed more data.

She cautiously opened one eye, and then the other, and found herself staring at what seemed to be the forward bulkhead of the hab shed, at the far end of the cabin from her bunk. She was pasted, facedown, to the wall of the shed. She realized her nose was somehow both numb and sore at the same time, and the pain in her head was across her forehead. She must have slammed herself facefirst into the wall somehow. That, as least, would explain the headache—but how the hell had she thrown herself across the cabin? Even in zero gee, it was a hell of a stunt. Had she leapt out of bed during a nightmare?

Moving cautiously to avoid the stomach-whirling nausea she still half-expected, she reached out with both her hands and pushed herself away from the bulkhead. She drifted back away from the wall—and then was astonished to find herself drifting back down toward it. No, not drifting— falling .

She scrambled in midair and managed to swing herself around fast enough to land, rather awkwardly, on her rump rather than her face again. Falling? In zero gee? Not zero anymore. She would estimate it as about a twentieth gee or so.

She sat there, staring at the cabin above her— above her—in utter bewilderment. Her bunk was bolted to the aft wall of the cabin—which had now become the ceiling. The sheet was caught by one of the restraint clips, or otherwise it would have fallen too. Now it hung absurdly down. She glanced around the forward bulkhead she was sitting on and found it littered with bits and pieces of equipment that had slammed down with her. She reached up and felt a bump on the top of her head. Something must have clipped her as it fell.

She stood up, as carefully as she could, and tried to think. When she had gone to sleep, her hab shed had been bolted to the side of asteroid AC125DN1RA45, a tiny hunk of rock less than half a kilometer across, far too small to generate any gravity field worth mentioning. Maybe a ten-thousandth of a gee, tops. Now, suddenly, she was in a gee field hundreds of times stronger than that. What the hell was going on? Had someone moved her hab shelter for some reason?

Her shelter was a cylinder about fifteen meters long. Or, now, fifteen meters tall, with Coyote standing on the bottom looking up. At its midsection was an airlock system. There were two viewports at the midsection as well, one set into the airlock and the other set into the bulkhead opposite. One port afforded a view of the asteroid’s surface, the other a view spaceward. What she couldn’t see through the ports she ought to be able to see using the remote-control exterior camera. The camera’s controls were set into the wall by the airlock.

It took her two or three tries, and two or three crashes, before she managed to jump precisely enough to grab a handhold by the airlock and clip herself into place with the restraint belts intended for holding small pieces of cargo. She looked through the rockside port first and breathed a sigh of relief. RA45’s dark bulk was still there. She recognized not only the rumpled landscape, but her own mining gear. And there was the drill pit down into the rock’s interior.

Then she looked out the spaceward viewport and discovered something was missing after all. Not on the rock. In the sky.

In a horrifying flash she realized what she wasn’t seeing. Her ship. The Vegas Girl was gone.

No, wait a second. There it was, a tiny blinking dot of light far to sternward, the Girl’s tracking strobe.

How the hell could this have happened? She had left the Vegas Girl in a perfectly matched orbit relative to RA45. There was no way she could have drifted that far while Coyote was asleep.

Unless she had been sleeping for one hell of a long time. She checked her watch and compared it to the time display on the hab shed’s chronometer. She even checked the date, just to be sure she hadn’t slept around the clock. But no, she had been out only a few hours. How far had her ship drifted?

Coyote grabbed the radar range-and-rate gun out of its rack and aimed it through the spaceward viewport, lining up the sights on the Girl . It was a low-power portable unit, not really meant to work at long range. Normally she used it to establish distance from and velocity toward an asteroid, but it could track her ship just as handily. She got the blinking strobe in the sights and pulled the trigger.

The gun pinged cheerfully twice to indicate it had gotten a good range and rate on its target. Coyote checked the gun’s tracking data display.

And her heart nearly stopped. The Vegas Girl was over one hundred kilometers astern, and the ship was moving away at over three hundred meters a second.

But wait a moment. The tracker just showed relative velocity, not which object was doing the moving. She peered out the port again, and spotted the triple-blink beacon she had left on RA46, the last rock she had worked. She swore silently. RA46 was in the wrong part of the sky. She fired a ranging pulse at it and got back virtually the same velocity value. The Girl was stationary relative to RA46. So it wasn’t the ship moving. It was this rock. It was moving at nearly twelve hundred kilometers an hour relative to the ship! But how the hell—

Good Golly God. She wasn’t in a gravity field—that was a one-twentieth-gee acceleration she was feeling. But for how long? Coyote knew that velocity could accumulate at a hellacious rate under even modest acceleration.

Even so, she was startled by the results when she ran the problem. Assuming one-twentieth gee, that meant the rock had been accelerating for only ten or eleven minutes. Somehow, the numbers were the most frightening thing.