Jack McDevitt - Infinity Beach

Foolishly, Emily held her ground, blocking the vessel’s route back through the door, which was closing fast. “ Please, ” she said. “ Give us a chance. ”

Twin beams of red light lanced from the fork on the ship’s prow. They struck her squarely in the abdomen and propelled her into the air lock and sent her tumbling out the door. Tripley screamed and made a grab for her but he succeeded only in changing her course and very nearly going out himself. He stared after her retreating form, turned, and charged the turtle-shell. Kane ordered Tripley to stop. But it was too late. The mission director seized the microship and his momentum carried both of them across the chamber. They crashed into a wall and Tripley bounced away in the zero gravity, still holding tight to the celestial.

The outer door closed.

“ Going to one gee, ” Kane said.

Tripley and the microship fell to the floor.

Emily, picked up by one of the screens, continued drifting away, trailing red bubbles.

“ Monitoring zero— ” Kane’s voice broke. He needed a moment to regain control and finish: “— Zero pulse. ”

Yoshi was adamant. “ I say we turn them loose. Turn them loose, get away from here, and forget it ever happened .”

“ They killed Emily, ” said Tripley. “ How can we just let them go? ”

“ They were scared. They wanted out. ”

“ There was no need. ”

Kane broke in: “ Nobody has more reason than I do to want the little bastards dead. ” He stopped and his jaw worked. “ But this is a special case. Yoshi’s right. Point them toward the hydrogen— ” he meant the gas giant, “— and let them go. ”

Tripley shook his head. “ That means she’d have died for nothing. What do we tell people when we get home? We found some celestials, but they didn’t want to talk a whole lot. Don’t know how the ship works, we didn’t get a chance to ask. Don’t know where they’re from. Otherwise ask us anything. By the way, we lost Emily. ”

“ What do you want to do? ” asked Kane.

“ I say we take them with us. We’re committed. For God’s sake, Markis, we’ve paid the price. We owe it to her.”

“ If we’d used our heads— ”

“ It’s late for recriminations. You want me to take the blame? Okay, it’s my fault. ”

“ That doesn’t bring her back, Kile. ”

“ I know. It was stupid. We took a chance. But we’ve got to make it count for something. How could we possibly walk away from this now? ”

**”A”i7e?” Yoshi’s voice, strained. “ I don’t think any body’ll thank us for this. ”

“ What do you mean? How can you say that? This is it! It’s the Holy Grail. ”

“ People will be happy to have the discovery, but we’ll be a laughingstock. ”

Tripley shook his head desperately. “ You wanted to bring them on board as much as I did. ”

“ Think about it, ” said Yoshi. “ We don’t know what kind of hypercomm messages they’ve been sending out. Look out for the giants with their open doors. Shoot on sight. What do you think people are going to say to the pictures of you charging the ship and banging it against a wall? ”

“ Markis, is that really on the log? ”

“ Yes, I’m afraid so, Kile. ”

“ My God. But the bastards are killers. ”

“ Only because they were being hijacked, ” insisted Yoshi. “ That’s the way they saw it. And the way the media will play it. Look, I’m not trying to blame anybody. But we need to think about this. Reputations, careers, everything’s going to go. We’ll even show up in the history books as dummies of the first order. They’ll be laughing at us for centuries. ”

They were in mission control. Emily’s body had been retrieved and placed in her bunk. The celestial was centered on their screens, lying pinned by gravity to the cargo deck. “ We can’t just throw this away, ” Tripley pleaded.

No one answered.

Kim reran the sequence in the cargo hold. She froze the picture at the moment of impact, when the bolt struck Emily, and she magnified it and focused on her sister’s face plate. She could make out her expression, which betrayed more surprise than agony.

She died quickly, and that was some consolation. But there had been a few seconds after the attack, when the lights were going out, when Kim could almost read her thoughts: I have it in my hands, a ship built by another civilization, and I’ll never know who they are –

The design of her colleagues now took on a kind of Greek inevitability. They would take the turtle-shell back to Greenway and find out what they could about it and its occupants. But first they had to negate the vehicle’s capacity to do damage.

They accomplished the latter by determining that the weapon used against Emily was the “fork” mounted on the prow. They used a bar to break it off and then secured the vehicle in a stowage locker.

They next engaged in a heated debate before taking the eventually unanimous, if reluctant, decision to conceal the outcome of the mission. “ Until, ” in Tripley’s words, “ the time is right to reveal what we’ve found. If that ever happens. ” Kane was most opposed to the plan, perhaps because he did not like deceit, but also and most certainly because it required him to falsify the ship’s records. But he eventually succumbed to the argument that if they reported events as they had occurred, their careers would be ruined and their reputations destroyed. They would be remembered for their folly as long as the species endured.

So they would take the microship back to Greenway and examine it themselves. And in the meantime they hoped that maybe one of them would think of a way out of the frightful dilemma into which they had sunk.

The strategy required that Emily be left behind, since there was no way to explain her death. It was Tripley who devised the plan that they would “return” her to Terminal City, book a hotel reservation for her, use her ID to create the illusion that she’d gotten into a cab, and let the authorities figure out why she never arrived.

Having laid out their course, their last action before leaving orbit was to consign Emily to the void.

All this was on the record, as if Kane wanted to make it available to some future—What? Historian? Judge?

The logs ended immediately after the burial service. The screen went blank and the power blinked off.

Kim sat in the lengthening shadows listening to the ocean.

“ Kim, you have a call from Canon Woodbridge. ”

“Put him on, Shep.”

Actually, she got an assistant, a young male with a somber, self-important manner. “Dr. Brandywine?”

“Yes? This is she.” If he gave his name she missed it.

“Dr. Woodbridge wishes you to come to Salonika tomorrow. He asked me to express his regrets that he couldn’t call you himself, but he’s extremely busy.”

“Why?” she asked.

“He’s always quite busy, Doctor.”

“I mean, why does he want me in the capital?”

“I believe it’s an award ceremony of some sort. He’s quite anxious that you be here.”

“You can’t tell me what it’s about?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t have details. But transportation’s been arranged. You’ll be picked up at nine tomorrow morning. I hope that’s not inconvenient.”