Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Wolf was staring at the notepack’s screen, his fingers busy on the touchpad. Dianne Steiger studied him for a moment. His appearance matched that of his office: a precise, orderly man trying to keep up with too much coming in from all sides at once. He was clean-shaven, his hair neatly combed, his shirt fresh, his eyes clear and alert—but exhaustion was peeking through the facade. He was not working through the notepack steadily, but in spurts of energy that spent themselves almost before they began. Then he would blink, shake his head, and force himself to concentrate anew. He took a careful sip of the coffee and made a face. At last he glanced up and realized with a start that Dianne and Gerald were there. “My God. I did not even hear you come in. Forgive me, I have been working too hard. You are astronaut Dianne Steiger, yes?”

Astronaut . That was his interest. A light went on in Dianne’s head. Suddenly she knew why she was here. She had thought that perhaps Bernhardt had wanted an eyewitness account of the Big Jump as seen from space, but no. This was something far bigger. She looked at Gerald, her heart suddenly trip-hammer fast with excitement. Something in his face seemed to confirm her guess. She looked back to Wolf Bernhardt.

“Yes I am.” She hesitated a moment, and then blurted it out. “You want the Terra Nova .” Her heart was pounding, and a dull, silent roar echoed dimly inside her head. Terra Nova . The prize lost so long ago. Dianne rarely allowed herself even to think of the canceled star-ship project. She had been only a few steps away from becoming a reserve pilot before the program had been canceled.

But now the prize would be even more rich. There were dozens of worlds, eight whole star systems in one to explore out there—

“I have the Terra Nova ,” Bernhardt said abruptly, cutting into her reverie. “There are rush crews prepping her for a sprint mission to the Dyson Sphere right now. What I want—what I need—is you .”

Dianne lifted her left hand as carefully as she could, and tried to move it with something close to grace. But even wiggling her fingers was clumsy. “Ah, sir, of course I want to go—but I don’t think I can pilot. Not for a while. Not with this hand.”

“ Pilots I have,” Wolf said dismissively. “What I want you for is captain . No one else on Earth can know that ship as well as you do.”

The roaring in her ears suddenly got louder, and Dianne blinked hard. Dreams aren’t supposed to come true, especially in the middle of a nightmare. Earth had been kidnapped, and so she got to fly a starship. Right into a Dyson Sphere. Suddenly her heart sank. That was a plan for disaster. But Wolf Bernhardt was still talking. Dianne forced herself back to reality.

“—the Terra Nova is tremendously complex. The training to handle it goes far beyond flying even a large interplanetary craft. We need someone who understands the broad picture. My office has found enough spacers who can fill the specialty jobs aboard—lander pilots, science specialists, medical, astronomers, orbital observation scientists and so on. Gerald here will be going along as chief scientific officer. But there are damn few from the original group of Terra Nova officers and crew candidates, people who really know that ship and what she can and can’t do. Most of the original candidates out-emigrated to find work. They’re back in the Solar System where we can’t get at them. The others—ah, well, there were very high casualties among spacers when the Big Jump happened.”

Bernhardt hesitated over that point, as if he could say more. It occurred to Dianne that she had never seen a breakdown of just how many casualties there had been. This DSI operation was keeping a lot of disturbing data to itself. “What it comes down to,” Bernhardt went on, “is that you are far and away the most qualified person for this job who’s still with Earth and alive.”

Dianne thought fast, considering as many sides of the situation as she could. It was tempting to just agree, to make the grand gesture and charge off to adventure. But no. False courage or bravado might help her ego, but the price for Earth would be too high. If she had to throw her dreams away, so be it. She leaned forward abruptly. “Yes, I’m here and alive. And I want to stay that way for a while.” She had to take charge of this little chat now if she was going to do it.

Wolf looked at her in surprise. “You aren’t accepting the mission voluntarily? I assure you that I have the power to draft labor—”

“For a suicide mission?” she asked. “For a mission that will throw away one of the few cards planet Earth has in this game? I’ll fly the Terra Nova —but not straight down the throat of a monster four hundred million times bigger than Earth! Not until I know something more about that monster.”

Wolf looked at Dianne. For the first time, he seemed to be considering her as something more than a chess piece. “What, exactly, are you saying?” he asked carefully.

“That the Terra Nova took years to build, and so would her replacement. If we even could build her replacement, with most of our off-planet resources and infrastructure gone. For at least the time being, she is irreplaceable. This new Multisystem of yours is likely to be dangerous enough without sending the ship to commit suicide deliberately. Wouldn’t it be nice at least to try to collect some data with the ship before she is vaporized by the enemy? Perhaps, to find out who and what the enemy is?”

“Same thing I’ve been saying, Wolf,” Gerald MacDougal put in. “We ought to search as much of the rest of this system as we can, and then consider a cautious approach to the Sphere. Think about how big the Sphere is. Even if you make the unwarranted assumption that the control system exists, and the further unwarranted assumption that it is on the exterior surface of the Sphere, and not the inside, you’ve got an incredibly large search area. Search the entire surface area of all nine planets in our old Solar System, plus the Sun as well while you’re at it, and you wouldn’t have done one percent of this search.”

“I agree completely,” Dianne said. “Your imaginary control center could cover as much area as Earth’s surface and still get lost on something that big. And what would it look like? What would we be searching for? And while we’re searching that Sphere, what are the people who run the Sphere going to be doing?”

There was the faintest flicker of a smile on Wolf’s face. “I see that you are already behaving as a captain should. Protecting your command. Very well. How would you use the Terra Nova !”

Dianne thought for a long moment and then spoke, choosing her words carefully. “I would explore a sampling of the worlds and stars in the Multisystem, perhaps gradually working in toward the Dyson Sphere itself—if we learned enough to give the Sphere mission some hope of success that would justify the risk. I would do everything I could to avoid risks to the ship or her personnel. I’d be extremely conservative about landings—and I’d run like hell if I was challenged.”

“And what would you do if I ordered you to do it my way?” Wolf asked. “What if I drafted you into the service of the DSI they’ve cooked up, and ordered you to head straight for the Sphere?”

Dianne shrugged. If the man wanted to ask hypothetical questions… “A captain in space is the absolute master of her ship, particularly as regards the safety of the ship and crew. I’d do it my way. Legally, I don’t know who’d be right. But as a practical matter, the Terra Nova was designed to take longer trips than this without help from Earth. You couldn’t do anything to stop me.”