Jack McDevitt - Infinity Beach

“Yes,” she said. “I knew.”

“You’ve seen the logs?”

“No.” She put her drink down. Rocked back and forth. Stared into the growing dusk. “No. I had no wish to see the gory details. But I knew what happened. He was tortured by it.”

“What about Mount Hope? What’s the rest of the story?”

She opened a drawer on the side table and took out a disk. “He knew that somebody would eventually do what you have done, somebody would get at least part of the truth. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been somebody else.” A lamp burned inside the window. “My instructions were that, if the logs were found, this statement should be made available to the authorities. That’s not you, but it seems that you’re the logical person to receive it nonetheless.”

Kim took it. “Do you want to watch it?”

“I’ve seen it.”

Kim slipped it into a jacket pocket. “You should be aware that I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll make any of this public.”

She shrugged. “Make it public and be damned.”

Kim got up and turned to go.

Tora stayed on the swing. “ You should be aware,” she said, “that what you have is a copy. No part of the Hunter story is to be made public unless all of it is. If you don’t see to it, I will.”

When she got home, Kim put it on the flat screen.

The first image was the Valiant . A timer in the lower right hand corner gave the date April 3,573, 6:48 P.M. The Mount Hope explosion, she recalled, had occurred on that same date at a little after seven o’clock in the evening.

The Valiant was on a table. It was bathed in light, and she could see part of a device that looked like a sensor suspended overhead. She couldn’t make out anything else, but the table looked like the one she’d seen in Tripley’s basement lab.

An arm came into the picture, adjusted the sensor. And she heard Kile’s voice: “ How’s that, Yosh? ” The arm was in a white sleeve. It withdrew, and Kim could see nothing except the microship and the tabletop.

“ That’s good. That’ll do it. ”

And Kile again: “ Markis, we’re ready to start. ”

“ Be right down. ”

The timer continued to run.

“ Ready? ” asked Tripley.

Yoshi again: “ All set. ” Then her voice going higher: “ Hey, Kile, what’s that? ”

Kim saw nothing.

“ Not sure. ” The arm came back, went behind the ship on the port side, and blocked the imager’s view. “ Hey, we’ve got an open hatch! “

The table and the ship rippled .

Mist rose from a dozen places on the Valiant , as if the spacecraft were venting.

The arm jerked away.

And now the voices became confused.

“ What is that? ”

“ They’re not dead. ”

“ My God, Kile, stay away from it. ”

“ Get upstairs! “

The lighting changed abruptly, as if a curtain had passed in front of a lamp. And something that looked like an oversized dragonfly appeared from behind the ship and glided out of the picture.

Kile screamed for Yoshi to look out, and then Kim heard more shouts, but nothing from Yoshi. Someone heavy—Tripley, it must have been—ran across the floor and pounded up the staircase. There were more cries, some now coming from Kane, and she heard a sickening crunch, the sound of flesh impacting and bones breaking.

Yoshi.

Now the heavy steps came back downstairs. Kim understood that Yoshi had fallen or been pushed off the stairway, that Tripley was trying to do something for her, and then he was swearing he would kill the bastards—those were his words—and he hurried back up the stairs and out of the laboratory.

The Valiant remained untouched on the table until the record stopped.

A new image appeared: Markis Kane in a black, loose-fitting shirt. The date advanced to August 11,575. More than two years later.

Lines had appeared in his face, and for several seconds he merely stared out of the screen. Kim thought he appeared unsure of himself. Not at all the Kane she’d come to know.

“I have no way of knowing,” he said, “who will hear this account of the Hunter , and of the destruction of Severin Village. We are all culpable, everyone who was on the mission. For the sake of the others, and perhaps for my own reputation, I would have preferred these events continue as they have, one unremarked, the other unexplained. But I must assume that the listener knows enough that the rest should be made clear.

“Let me admit at the outset that the primary responsibility for the disaster that overtook Severin Village on April 3, 573, is mine. I consented against my better judgment to the seizure of the celestial vessel. I suggested and executed the tactic for bringing it aboard ship, an act which resulted directly in the death of Emily Brandywine. I further failed to dissuade Kile Tripley in his intention to bring the vessel to Greenway, even though I knew there was a potential for precisely the kind of disaster that occurred. That I have not stepped forward and acknowledged these facts has been dishonorable. I hope, before the truth emerges, as it surely must, I will be safely dead, beyond the grip of public opprobrium, or of any but divine justice.

“There was no indication of life aboard the celestial at any time after we had taken it onboard. We assumed that Kile’s attack on the vessel had killed whatever had been inside. We had mixed emotions about that. It was not the way one wants first contact to occur. But they had, after all, taken Emily’s life.

“Kile’s intention was to keep the discovery secret for a time, and to bring in a few discreet researchers. He planned to use one of several laboratories available to the Foundation, for the purpose of dissecting the artifact and retrieving its secrets. But the problem was that the laboratories were all located in heavily populated areas.

“We did not know how the vessel was powered. But we thought it wise to assume it used the only fuel we knew of that made entry into transdimensional space possible: antimatter. That presented us with a unique problem. If they did indeed use antimatter, there was always the possibility of a breach in the containment system. Should that happen, should its power reach so low a level that it could not maintain the magnetic bottle, the vessel would explode, and take us and a sizable portion of the neighborhood with it. Consequently we needed a lab in a remote location.

“I should add parenthetically that we felt we had time, since every test we had run indicated that power was flowing through the ship, and that maintenance systems did seem to be stable. Of course, as the event showed, much of this was guesswork.

“To reduce the danger, Kile decided that the Foundation would sponsor a lab on Shimmer, where an accident could harm no one except volunteer technicians. A hypercomm message was sent before we left Alnitak, directing that work be started immediately. Nevertheless, it would be several months before the facility could be ready.

“In my own defense, I should point out that I argued throughout that the artifact be left in orbit around one of the Jovians in the Helian system, where there could be no danger to anyone. But it was too much to ask of Kile, who was anxious to get to a place where they would have the capability to inspect the find. At the very least, he maintained, the bodies of the crew had to be examined as quickly as possible.

“Kile elected to take it to his summer home in Severin. It was a compromise choice, with less potential for disaster than there would have been in, say, Terminal City or Marathon. At the time, it seemed not unreasonable.