Timothy Zahn - Deadman Switch

The Pravilo doctor stepped back from the Kharg's helm chair, returning the hypo to its place in his small case. My stomach a hard knot, I forced myself to watch as the dead hands lifted delicately and reached for the helm board. I shuddered—those hands could have been Calandra's. They settled there; and abruptly the stars vanished from the bridge displays.

"Deadman Switch in control, Commodore," the man at the ditto helm announced. "Taking us out on bearing twenty-two mark four zero, fifty-six mark three three."

Freitag nodded. "Navigation?"

The navigator's hands were already playing over his board. "There's nothing in particular listed for that direction, sir," he reported. "No large planetoids or cometary bodies. Though that may not mean much—except for Solitaire system itself, data for this part of space is pretty sketchy."

"Which should encourage all of you to keep sharp," Freitag reminded the bridge in general. "Wherever the Cloud generator is stashed, it's likely to be either well hidden or well defended. Or both." He swiveled another quarter turn. "Dr. Eisenstadt?"

Standing beside the ditto nav chair, Eisenstadt leaned over to peer into Shepherd Zagorin's glazed eyes. "Thunderhead? You still with us?"

"I am," Zagorin whispered.

"Are we on the right path?"

"Yes," she assured him.

I watched her closely, trying with all my skill to read past the words to what might lie beneath them. As usual, the attempt failed. There were subtle differences in the sense between one encounter and another, I could tell now, differences that might be related to thunderhead emotional coloring the same way it was to that of human beings. But it could equally well be a result of Zagorin becoming acclimated to the contact, or to different thunderheads handling their end of the communication each time, or to any of a dozen other factors.

Beside me, Calandra shivered. "You were right, Gilead," she murmured. Her eyes, I saw, were on the body at the Deadman Switch. "It is the same. The same motions, the same sense, the same... everything."

She trailed off. I turned to Eisenstadt, to find him looking in turn at Calandra. His eyes flicked to mine, then shifted to the helm and Commodore Freitag sitting stiffly in his command chair. His sense... "Something wrong?" I asked quietly.

Eisenstadt hesitated, shook his head. "Just... thinking. Wondering about... well, the logic involved here."

The logic of the Cloud. With all his attention focused on getting a zombi for this trip, Eisenstadt had apparently lost sight of all the questions and contradictions that had sparked this trip out in the first place. "I presume you and Commodore Freitag intend to move carefully," I said.

"Give us a little credit for brains," he grunted. "I just wish the thunderheads would loosen up and tell us exactly what they expect us to do for them out here."

His eyes dropped to Zagorin's impassive face, but if the thunderhead listening through her ears recognized the cue he ignored it. Zagorin remained silent, and after a minute Eisenstadt grunted again and gave up. "Anyway," he said to me, "we should know within ten hours. Wherever it is they're taking us, it has to be inside the Cloud itself."

I nodded down at Zagorin. "Are you going to have her maintain contact the whole way?"

Eisenstadt pursed his lips, shook his head. "No, I suppose not. They're not," he added dryly, "exactly being fountains of information, after all. Ms. Zagorin?—you can go ahead and break contact. Thunderhead, we'll be talking to you later. If there's anything we need to know, you'd better tell us now."

Zagorin straightened slightly. "Farewell," she said... and with a loud sigh slumped in her seat.

Eisenstadt looked at me, a sour expression on his face. "Or in other words," he growled, "they're still playing it coy."

"Don't worry about it," Freitag advised him coolly. "Whoever or whatever is out there running the Cloud generator, we'll be ready for them."

Woe to those going down to Egypt for help, who put their trust in horses, who rely on the quantity of chariots, and on great strength of cavalrymen...

Quietly, I slipped out of the bridge, leaving Freitag and the others to their watch. And their confidence.

—

It didn't take the ten hours Eisenstadt had been prepared for. It was, in fact, just under an hour later when the Kharg's pseudogravity abruptly vanished.

We had arrived.

There were no warning sirens, no terse announcements of red alert or whatever as I left the command ready room and floated hurriedly across the small lounge to the bridge proper. Not that that was really surprising; Freitag would hardly have left matters to a last-second scramble for battle stations, any more than he had permitted me to stray farther from the bridge than the nearby ready room. Still, somehow, the silence was more unnerving than the sounds of even a pitched battle would have been. As if the bridge crew—perhaps even the entire ship—had been suddenly killed or disabled... Heart thudding in my ears, senses fully alert, I slid open the bridge door and pulled myself in.

And, naturally, instantly felt like a fool. Everyone was still alive and well, working quietly at their posts. The overall sense of the room was concentration, underpinned with tension and controlled nervousness, but there was nothing that seemed to indicate imminent danger.

I took a deep breath, privately embarrassed by my sudden wild imagination... and preoccupied with that, it took me another second to realize that that very lack of danger sense was in itself a signal that something here wasn't right.

Calandra was sitting quietly to one side, strapped into a ditto station chair where she could observe without being in the way. Giving the wall a push, I floated over to her. "What's wrong?" I murmured.

She shrugged fractionally, her sense uneasy. "There doesn't seem to be anything out there," she said.

I frowned, giving all the displays within eyeshot a quick scan. They meant little to my untrained eye. "Error?" I asked.

She flicked a glance at Eisenstadt and Zagorin, the latter working on getting into a meditative state—

I was looking at Zagorin, not any of the displays; but even so my peripheral vision was dazzled by the brilliant flicker of light that flashed across the room. "What—?"

I was drowned out by the warble of warning sirens. "Radiation attack," one of the crewers snapped. "Bow-starboard hull registering particle fluxes of—it's off the scale, sir." His voice sounded awed and more than a little shaken. "Heavy magnetic flux residue—focused particle beam weapon, almost certainly."

"Backtrack it, Kernyov," Freitag ordered another man. "Pinpoint the source. Costelic, how much got through?"

The first crewer opened his mouth to speak... paused. "Uh... virtually none, sir," he said slowly, frowning at his displays in disbelief. "The inner hull sensors are recording just barely above background."

"The hull is designed to block radiation, isn't it?" Eisenstadt asked.

"Not from particle weapons that go off the scale," Freitag said tartly. "You got a spectrum profile yet, Costelic?"

"It's coming in now, sir." Costelic paused, his puzzlement growing even deeper. "It... doesn't appear to have been a beam, sir. The distribution suggests an extremely hot thermal spectrum, almost like residue from a point source."

"Some kind of nova or star-collapse remnant, maybe?" Eisenstadt suggested doubtfully. "A wall of radiation sweeping past might give readings like that."

Freitag shook his head, studying Costelic's readings. "Too sharply defined for that. Kernyov!—where's that backtrack report?"

I looked at Kernyov in time to see him wave his hands helplessly. "It doesn't backtrack, sir," he said, voice rich with frustration. "I can pull a vector from the particle velocities—it's vague, but it's there—but there just isn't anything in that direction."