Charles Sheffield - Summertide

Entry to the Dobelle system offered no options. There was only one spaceport, set close to the middle of Opal’s Starside hemisphere. There was no spaceport of any kind on Quake. According to her reference texts, safe access to Quake came only via Opal.

Safe access to Quake?

A nice idea, but Darya recalled what she had read of Quake and of Summertide. Maybe the reference texts needed to find different words… at least at this time of the year.

The reference files of the Fourth Alliance had even fewer good things to say than Legate Pereira about the worlds controlled by the Phemus Circle. “Remote… impoverished… backward… thinly populated… barbaric.”

The stars of the Circle lay in a region overlapped by all three major clades of the spiral arm. But in their outward expansions the Fourth Alliance, the Zardalu Communion, and the Cecropia Federation had shown negligible interest in the Phemus Circle. There was nothing there worth buying, bargaining for, or stealing — hardly enough to justify a visit.

Unless one was looking for trouble. Trouble was supposed to be easy to find on any world controlled by the Circle.

Darya Lang stepped out of the ship onto the spongy ground of Opal’s Starside spaceport and looked around her with misgiving. The buildings were low and ground-hugging, built of what looked like plaited reeds and dried mud. No one was waiting to greet the ship. Opal was described as metal-poor, wood-poor, and people-poor. All it had was water, and lots of it.

As her shoe sank an inch or two into the soft surface she felt even more uneasy. She had never visited a waterworld, and she knew that instead of hard rock and solid ground beneath her feet, there was only the weak and insubstantial crust of the Sling. Below that was nothing but brackish water, a couple of kilometers deep. The buildings hugged the ground for a good reason. If they were too tall and heavy, they would break through it.

An irrelevant thought came to her: she could not even swim.

The crew of the ship that had brought her were still involved with the final stages of landing procedure. She began to walk toward the nearest building. Two men were finally emerging from it to greet her.

It was not a promising introduction to Opal. Both men were short and thin — Darya Lang was ten centimeters taller than either of them. They were dressed in identical dingy uniforms, with clothes that shared a patched and well-worn look, and from a distance the two might have been taken for brothers, one ten years or so older than the other. Only as she came closer were their differences revealed.

The older man had a friendly, matter-of-fact air to him and a self-confident walk. The faded captain’s insignia on his shoulder indicated that he was the senior of the two in rank as well as age. “Darya Lang?” he said as soon as they were within easy speaking distance. He smiled and held out his hand, but not to shake hers. “I’ll take your entry forms. I’m Captain Rebka.”

Add “brusque” to the list of words describing the inhabitants of the Phemus Circle, she thought. And add “unkempt” and “battered” to Rebka’s physical description. The man’s face had a dozen scars on it, the most noticeable running in a double line from his left temple to the point of his jaw. And yet the overall effect was not unpleasant — rather the opposite. To her surprise, Darya sensed the indefinable tingle of mutual attraction.

She handed over her papers and made internal excuses for the scars and the grimy uniform. Dirt was only superficial, and maybe Rebka had been through some exceptional misfortune.

Except that the younger man looked just as dirty, and he had his own scars. At some time his neck and one side of his face had been badly burned, with a bungled attempt at reconstructive surgery that would never have been accepted back on Sentinel Gate.

Maybe the burn scars had also left the skin of his face lacking in flexibility. Certainly he had a very different expression from Rebka. Where the captain was breezy in manner and likeable despite his grubbiness and lack of finesse, the other man seemed withdrawn and distant. His face was stiff and expressionless, and he hardly seemed aware of Darya, although she was standing less than two meters from him. And whereas Rebka was clearly in top physical shape, the other had a run-down and unhealthy look, the air of a man who did not eat regular meals or care at all about his own health.

His eyes were at variance with his young face. Dead and disinterested, they were the pale orbs of a man who had withdrawn from the whole universe. He was unlikely to cause Darya any trouble.

Just as she reached that comforting conclusion the face before came alive and the man snapped out, “My name is Perry. Commander Maxwell Perry. Why do you want to visit Quake?”

The question destroyed her composure completely. Coming without the preliminary and traditional courtesies of Alliance introductions, it convinced Darya Lang that these people knew — knew about the anomaly, knew about her role in discovering it, and knew what she was there to seek. She felt her face turning red.

“The — the Umbilical.” She had to struggle to find words. “I — I have made a special study of Builder artifacts; it has been my life’s work.” She paused and cleared her throat. “I have read all that I could find about the Umbilical. But I want to see it for myself and learn how the tethers work on Opal and Quake. And discover how Midway Station controls the Umbilical for the move to space at Summertide.” She ran out of breath.

Perry remained expressionless, but Captain Rebka had a little smile on his face. She was sure that he saw right through her every word.

“Professor Lang.” He was reading from her entry papers. “We do not discourage visitors. Dobelle needs all the revenue it can get. But this is a dangerous time of year on Opal and Quake.”

“I know. I have read about the sea tides on Opal, and the land tides on Quake.” She cleared her throat again. “It is not my nature to seek danger.” That at least was true, she thought wryly. “I propose to be very careful and take all precautions.”

“So you have read about Summertide.” Perry turned to Rebka, and Darya Lang detected a tension between the two men. “As have you, Captain Rebka. But reading and experiencing something are not the same. And neither of you seems to realize that Summertide this time will be different from all others in our experience.”

“Every time must be different,” Rebka said calmly. He was smiling, but Darya Lang could feel the conflict. Rebka was the older and the more senior, but on the issue of Summertide Commander Perry did not accept the other’s authority.

“This is exceptional,” Perry replied. “We will be taking extraordinary precautions, even on Opal. And as for what may happen on Quake, I cannot begin to guess.”

“Even though you have experienced half a dozen Summertides?”

Rebka had lost his smile. The two men faced each other in silence, while Darya looked on. She sensed that the fate of her own mission hung on the argument that they were having.

“The Grand Conjunction,” Perry said after a few seconds. And finally Darya had a statement that made sense to her as a scientist.

She had studied the orbital geometry of the Mandel system in detail while working on the Lang catalog of artifacts. She knew that Amaranth, the dwarf companion of Mandel, normally moved so far from the primary that the illumination it provided to Dobelle was little more than starlight. However, once every few thousand years its motion brought it much closer, to less than a billion kilometers of Mandel. Gargantua, the remaining gas-giant planet of the system, moved in the same orbital plane, and it, too, had its own point of close approach to Mandel.