Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

“Yeah,” she said. “I’d love to do that.”

“ Then do it. ”

“But how? There’s no program anymore. I can’t ride on the ships they send out now.”

“ How old are you, Janie? ”

“I’m thirteen.”

“ A child. ”

“I’m not a child.”

“ It’s okay. You won’t always be so young. ”

“I’m a teenager.”

“ Your time will come. When it does, take hold of the hour. Make it count. ”

“The AI said you could go to Alpha Centauri?”

“Not exactly, Daddy. She told me, when I got the chance, I should go.”

“Probably tells that to all the kids.”

“It seemed a strange thing to say.”

“It probably has a bug somewhere. Don’t worry about it.” They strode out through the doors onto Constitution Avenue. It was damp and rainy, but the air smelled of approaching spring. “They ought to do something about the damned things. Get them fixed.” Daddy flagged down a taxi and they climbed in. He gave Aunt Floss’s address, where they were staying, and the vehicle slipped back into traffic. “Encouraging kids to do crazy stuff. It’s probably Barkowski’s programing. Man dumb enough to miss the last bus off Europa, what can you expect?”

It rose out of the dark, indistinguishable from the blazing stars.

“No question about it,” said Carmody. “It’s in orbit.”

“Hugh.” McIras spoke without lifting her eyes from her console screen. “Are you sure it couldn’t have come from the surface?”

At that time, neither the world, nor its sun, had a name. We were a thousand light-years beyond the Veiled Lady, twelve days from the nearest outstation. It was a rare jewel, that planet, one of the few we’d seen whose climate and geology invited immediate human settlement. Its single continent straddled the north polar circle, crushed beneath the glaciers of a dying ice age. But it was also a world of island chains and serene oceans and towering granite peaks. There was no single land mass, other than that in the arctic region, big enough to have permitted extensive evolution of land animals. “No,” I said. “There’s nobody here.”

“I’m getting a regular pulse on the doppler,” said Carmody.

McIras braced her chin on one fist and stared at the image on the monitors. “Recall the teams,” she told the watch officer. “And get an estimate on how long it’ll take.”

I started to object, but got no further than climbing out of my seat. Her lips were a thin line. “Not now, Hugh,” she said quietly. “The regulations are explicit on this situation.” She punched a stud on her armrest. “This is the Captain. We may have a contact. Tenandrome is now at Readiness Condition Two. For those of you associated with Mr. Scott’s group,” she glanced toward me, “that means we might accelerate with little or no warning. Please prepare accordingly.”

Carmody hunched over his console, his eyes wide with excitement. “It’s artificial,” he said. “It has to be.”

“Dimensions?” asked McIras.

“Approximately 120 meters long, maybe 35 in diameter at its widest point, which is just forward of center.”

“About the size of an Ordway freighter,” said the watch officer. “Are we sure nobody else comes out here?”

“No one that we know of.” McIras returned her attention to the command screen. “Put bridge sound and pictures on secondary monitors.” I was grateful for that: at least my people wouldn’t be lying in their bunks wondering what the hell was happening.

I walked over and stood beside her so we could talk without being overheard. “This is going to cost a lot of time,” I said. “And probably some equipment as well. Why not investigate before recalling everybody?”

Saje McIras was a plain woman with prominent jaws and a mildly blotched skin that had resulted from a long battle with Travison’s Disease which, at the time she’d had it, usually killed. She blinked habitually, and her eyes were dull and lifeless, except on those occasions when she was driven to exert her considerable abilities. Then for perhaps a few moments, they were quite capable of taking fire. “If we get a surprise,” she said, “we may not want to wait around a day or two for you to gather your people.”

“I’m beginning to get some resolution,” said Carmody. He filtered out the glare, reduced the contrast, and eliminated the starfield. What remained was a single point of white light.

We watched it expand gradually into a squat heavy cylinder, thick though the middle, rounded at one end, flared at the other. “It’s one of ours,” said McIras, not entirely able to conceal her surprise. “But it’s old! Look at the design—.” It was small, and ungainly, and unsettlingly familiar, a relic from another age. It was the kind of ship that had leaped the stars during the early days of the Armstrong drive, that had carried Desiret and Taniyama and Bible Bill to the worlds that would eventually become the Confederacy. And it was the kind of ship that had waged the internecine wars, and that, in humanity’s darkest hour, had fought off the Ashiyyur. As far as anyone knew, the only other race in the galaxy. The telepaths. The Mutes.

For a long time, no one spoke.

It grew steadily larger.

“Captain,” said the watch officer. “Recovery estimates twenty-eight hours for the recall.”

“We have its orbit,” said Carmody. “Closest point of approach will occur in three hours, eleven minutes, at a range of 2600 kilometers.”

McIras acknowledged. “Stay with it. I want to know if it shows any response to our presence.”

She was a beautiful ship, silver and blue in the bright sunlight. Her lines curved gently: there was about her a sense of the ornate that one does not see in the cold gray vessels of the modern era. The parabolic prow with its sunburst, the flared tubes, the sweptback bridge, the cradled pods, all would have been of practical use only to an atmospheric flyer. Somehow, I felt as if I knew her; and she reminded me of a time when I’d been very young.

“What’s that on the hull?” asked a voice over the comm circuit.

Carmody had centered the Tenandrome’s long-range telescopes on the ship’s designator, a group of symbols beneath the bridge, which we were still unable to make out. But there was a mark just forward of them, near the bow, dark against the silver metal. He tried to increase magnification, but the image grew indistinct, so we waited while the two ships drew closer.

Recovery reported that two of the survey teams were en route from the surface. There were six others, but they would have to wait until we could change orbit. Several were already on the circuit, demanding to know what was going on. Holtmeyer exploded when I tried to explain it to him. (That was more or less typical of Holtmeyer, although, in his defense, he was at the time sitting on a glacier and thought he’d seen some large fossils through the ice.) McIras overheard most of it, maybe all of it, and she cut in near the end. “Hugh,” she said, on a circuit not audible to the ground, “tell him I said to get back here tout de suite , and without further discussion. By the way, you might be interested in knowing it’s a warship.” She explained something about transformational pods, but I stopped listening because the mark near the bow was resolving itself, and somebody else must have seen the same thing I did because there was a burst of profanity behind me.

It was a symbol we all knew: a black harridan spreading its wings across a crescent moon. And in that moment, I understood why I had recognized the vessel.