Джек Макдевитт - A Voice in the Night

The signal faded, and then came back: “—Orbit?”

“Negative,” I said.

George knew exactly what that meant and he did a desperate look toward the cargo door at the rear of the cabin. “Can we go back down?” he suggested. “Back to the Retreat?” That was the name we’d given the house on the mountain. The refuge constructed by a previously unknown race.

“We can’t. We wouldn’t make it.”

“Kellie, this thing has spike technology. We can just float down.”

I had to hand it to him. Most people would have been yelping about maybe getting killed, but he wasn’t even thinking about himself. “We don’t have enough lift,” I said.

“Then we have to salvage the cargo. That has to be our first priority.” And then, in case I wasn’t getting the point: “It doesn’t matter what happens to us.”

Speak for yourself, Champ. Anyhow, none of it mattered. All the priorities were going down together. He saw it in my eyes. “I’m sorry, George.”

Jimmy was reading my status reps. “Not good, Kellie.”

“Looks like.”

“Okay. Tod’s on his way. Figure about fifty minutes. Can you stay up that long?”

“Yes.” Firm. Voice steady. Hand on the stick. All for the good of the passenger. In fact it would be touch and go. “Jimmy?”

“Yes, Kellie?”

“What was it?”

“An EMP.” An electro-magnetic pulse.

“But we’re shielded.”

“Double dose. Both Twins let go at once. We’ve got problems here, too. Not like yours,” he continued helpfully. “But it’s a hassle.” The Twins were a pair of gas giants running around one another in a tight orbit. They pumped out EMP’s on a fairly regular basis. But what were the odds against simultaneous blasts?

George was shaking his head. “What’s going to happen when he gets here? Can he repair us?”

“Not underway. You and I are going to transfer over to Alpha.” Tod’s lander.

He looked as if I’d hit him with a stick. For a moment he said nothing. Then: “What about the cargo?”

I met his eyes and shook my head. The patient’s not going to make it, George.

“We can’t just abandon it,” he said.

I don’t get irritated easily, but I wondered what he expected me to do. “George,” I said, “I hate to put it to you this way, but the cargo’s the reason we’re going down.” The simple truth was we were hauling too much mass. Without the books, we might still have made it into orbit. If I’d been able to do it, I’d have jettisoned every last one of them.

And okay, I know what you’re thinking. But my first obligation is to the ship. And my passenger’s life. Not to mention my own.

In case anybody out there was in Tibet at the time, the moon’s name was Vertical. They called it that because it moves around the Twins in a perpendicular orbit.

The two gas giants in the system are pretty much identical in mass and size, and both have rings. They’re close together, only about three million klicks, and they’re caught in a gravitational dance. If you watch them from the Retreat, you can see them rise every twenty-some hours, circle each other, and set. It’s a hell of a show. I understand, when they reconstruct the place in Arlington, they’ll be able to recreate the effect in the oculus.

Their equatorial diameters measure 65,000 and 63,000 kilometers. Cobalt is the smaller of the two, and the brighter. It’s a jewel of a world, with silver and blue and gold belts. The blue is the result of methane slurry and ice crystals on the outer shell of the atmosphere. Cyclonic storms float deeper down, swirls of yellow and red with golden eyes. It’s gorgeous.

The companion world, Autumn, is darker. It also has a collection of storms, which appear to be larger and less well defined. Naturally they named the system Gemini.

At the center of mass, between the Twins, there’s a cloud larger than either. It’s dark and heavy, lit with internal fires, a cosmic thunderstorm marking the point around which everything else, planets, rings, and moons, orbits. It looks like a planet, creating the illusion of three worlds in a line.

To complete the symmetry, there’s a third ring, circling the entire system. It’s enormous, less well-defined than the individual planetary rings, a shining highway that, seen from our position near Vertical, passed into infinity in one direction and dipped below the horizon in the other. Earlier, George had laughed while he admitted he couldn’t begin to pin down the local directions. Who knew which way was east when the sun was lost amid all the moving lights?

Vertical’s orbit was extremely unstable, and the experts said the chances of its having happened naturally were remote. Almost nonexistent. Most of them thought that within a few thousand years it would lose its unique position, which lifts it away from everything else and provides it with extraordinary views of the Twins.

The Retreat was perched on a ledge near the top of a mountain in some of the roughest terrain I’ve ever seen. It’s got drapes and carpets, all pretty much washed out. And beds and chairs and sofas. All the furniture’s too big by half for humans. And there’s something else about it, something dark and gloomy in the design that tells you right away it wasn’t designed for us. It gave me the chills, for reasons I couldn’t explain. Brownstein, who specializes in these sorts of things, says that the symmetries are slightly off, and that the equivalences don’t quite match up. I don’t understand yet what he means, but he says it’s visceral. And it is.

The place looks almost like a Victorian mansion. Lots of windows, a tower at one end, and a courtyard. It was perched on a shelf high up one of the taller needle peaks. And it had apparently been abandoned for over a thousand years. We had the remains of its two occupants. They were humanoid, but definitely not human. Not someone you’d have invited over for dinner.

Tall, with gray flesh, dark eyes, fangs, long narrow hands that ended in claws. We even had a portrait of one of them. The thing was wearing a robe and looking every bit like the grim reaper.

At the time, they were just beginning to take the Retreat down. The plan was to move it to Arlington and put it back together along the Potomac. George had had a big argument about that with Sylvia, the director. He thought the Retreat should be left where it was. He’d been grumbling for weeks. It was sacrilege, he thought. I think it was the convenience store that really got him. “Tee-shirts and monogrammed whiskey glasses. Is there anything we won’t do for money?”

I’m not sure how he thought the Academy got its funds, or whether he’d have been upset if they’d held up a couple of his paychecks because no cash was available. I myself saw no problem with it, but the idea sure had him lit up.

After a while, we reached apogee and started to fall. That was a bad moment. We were moving fast, and that put us in a kind of lopsided semi-orbit, soaring out and then cutting back in fairly close to the ground, and getting closer with each pass around the moon. Somewhere in the middle of all this my sensors came to life and it became a little easier to judge our flight parameters. But it was tricky because the ground ahead kept rising and I never knew where perigee was.

“Mountains,” said George, who must have thought I was blind.

He’d been quiet for several minutes while we moved across a wide corrugated plain. I’d been watching the peaks grow and kicking the thrusters to get more altitude. Fuel by then was getting scarce. “We’ll get over them,” I told him.